Investigating Risk Disclosure Practices in European Listed Companies. What's going on about Reputational Risk?

The aim of this research is to investigate how European listed companies disclose on risk and to underline which kind of them influence companies’ decisions on exhibiting infor-mation about reputational risk in their annual report. The research measures risk infor-mation by conducting a content analysis of annual financial reports for a sample of 538 European listed companies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom). The paper is a multi-country study that emphasizes the differences in risk reporting prac-tices, focusing on different variables that affect the related content of annual financial re-ports of our sample. From a theoretical point of view, this research has been developed adopting Walker risk classification model (2013) to systematize the different types of risk and to analyse the connection with reputational risk. Our major findings show that there are still many differences in risk disclosure practices both among Countries and types of reported risk. Moreover, the companies that disclose more on reputational risk, are those that have a higher sensibility to risk management and that disclose more also on all the other types of risk.