Example 1: Annotated bibliography assignment

1.         Mbanyele, W., Huang, H., Li, Y., Muchenje, L. T., & Wang, F. (2022). Corporate social
responsibility and green innovation: Evidence from mandatory CSR disclosure laws. Economics
Letters, 212, 110322. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2022.110322

Mbanyele et al. (2022) examine the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance on
green innovation using CSR disclosure laws from different countries. Overall, the results of the
study demonstrate that corporate engagement in CSR activities increases social welfare through the
production of sustainable technologies. Furthermore, the results show that the impact of CSR
disclosure laws is more significant for companies with weaker corporate governance and for
companies that had lower CSR disclosure standards prior to CSR disclosure laws. A strength of this
study is that it circumvents problems in measuring CSR activities by using laws on mandatory CSR
reporting in different countries. The study is valuable because it provides consistent evidence
that the quality and quantity of green patents by companies are increasing in countries that have
enforced mandatory CSR disclosure laws. Moreover, the study provides evidence of the positive side
of regulatory change, which is important for future research.

2.         Jackson, G., Bartosch, J., Avetisyan, E., Kinderman, D., & Knudsen, J. S. (2019).
Mandatory Non-financial Disclosure and Its Influence on CSR: An International Comparison. Journal
of Business Ethics, 162. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04200-0

Jackson et al. (2020) examine the impact of non-financial disclosure (NFD) on corporate CSR
activities using two ideal types of regulation - government regulation and corporate
self-regulation. The study focuses on 24 OECD countries. The results show that companies in
countries that mandate non-financial disclosure engage significantly more in CSR activities.
Furthermore, NFD regulation does not lead to lower levels of corporate irresponsibility. Lastly, it
is shown that mandatory NFD is only effective in conjunction with stronger external scrutiny and
stakeholder rights, which can be seen as an important implication for public policy and corporate
ethics. A weakness of the study is that there is no finer measurement used regarding the specific
NFD requirements. This paper can still be useful because of its relevance by giving empirical and
theoretical contributions, as well as important implications for policy.

3.         Ren, S., Wei, W., Sun, H., Xu, Q., Hu, Y., & Chen, X. (2020). Can mandatory
environmental information disclosure achieve a win-win for a firm’s environmental and economic
performance? Journal of Cleaner Production, 250, 119530.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119530

Ren et al. (2020) investigate whether mandatory disclosure of environmental information can have a
win- win effect on the environmental and economic performance of companies, and to what extent it
affects it. The study focuses on Chinese companies from pollution-intensive industries between 2004
and 2015. The results show that environmental information disclosure improves companies’
environmental performance by increasing environmental management activities and costs. In contrast,
a negative effect is found in terms of economic performance. In addition, a stronger effect is
found for governmental as well as small and medium sized companies than for non-governmental and
large ones. The study is valuable for considering mandatory CSR activities of companies and giving
precise implications for policy on this, for example, that it is necessary to complete and
strengthen mandatory environmental disclosure laws. Weaknesses of the study include the exclusive
focus on Chinese companies and the limitations of the data, which make it difficult to apply the
findings to other countries.