A systematic literature review on risk disclosure research: State-of-the-art and future research agenda

Abstract

This study presents a systematic review of the existing literature on corporate risk disclosure (RD). The study reviews 104 studies published in 51 high-ranked journals over the period 1999–2019 following the systematic literature review methodology developed and employed by past works. The results highlight the substantial knowledge gaps and inconclusive findings of extant literature in several aspects, including identifying avenues for further research in terms of research designs, settings, scope and theories. The findings also indicate that limited studies focus on developing countries, private institutions, and non-profit organizations. Similarly, our findings show that existing research that examines other firm and cross-country drivers of risk, such as national accounting, auditing, economic, governance, language, and legal systems, are not well documented. By contrast, our review illustrates that there is an increase in the number of studies published in recent years with over one-half of those that we review in this research published in the last six years of our sample period. Furthermore, our results suggest that past review studies have also focused excessively on the immediate firm-level characteristics, such as firm size, growth, leverage, value, and cost of capital. The findings of our review will be of great interest to academics, accounting standard-setters, managers and practitioners, policymakers, regulators, researchers, and students.