Drivers of the CSR report assurance quality: Credibility and consistency for stakeholder engagement

The objective of this paper is to determine the effect that certain internal and external factors have on the CSR report assurance quality. Among the different internal factors, firm's incentives and the effectiveness of the CEO and the board of directors will be considered. The external factors analyzed are relating to the institutional pressures at the country and sector levels, and the intrinsic characteristics of the assurer. Using a sample of the 678 largest companies in the world in the 2011-2017 period, the application of the two-stage model confirms the supremacy of firms' incentives and the characteristics of the service provider as aspects with greater predictive capacity in the assurance quality. Results that would give the CEO, the board and institutional pressures a secondary role in corporate transparency because their effect only occurs in the absence of the two previous drivers.