Protect, respect, remedy, and report? Development of human rights reporting in the context of formal institutional settings

This paper investigates the influence of formal institutions, in particular legislation,on corporate human rights (HR) reporting. We use a mixed-method approach, com-bining qualitative institutional analysis of two European countries—the Netherlandsand Switzerland—with quantitative content analysis of annual reports of 94 listedcompanies for the years 2007 to 2019 (1222 firm-years). We find that, for eachobserved book year, companies in the Netherlands are more willing to disclose HRinformation than companies in Switzerland, which we explain by their differences informal institutional development. Our results indicate that formal institutions areessential determinants in HR reporting, both in the willingness of companies to dis-close and the extensiveness of disclosure. Moreover, we observe a significant posi-tive impact of legislation on HR reporting but find that the overall compliance levelsof affected companies are low. We contribute to prior research, by providing evi-dence on the development and institutional drivers of HR reporting, a largely over-looked branch of sustainability reporting.