Best paper award for Michael Graßmann, Stephan Fuhrmann and Thomas Günther

The co-authors Michael Graßmann, Stephan Fuhrmann and Thomas Günther were rewarded with the best paper award of the 14th Interdisciplinary Conference on “Intangibles and Intellectual Capital – Value Creation, Integrated Reporting and Governance" for their paper "Drivers of the disclosed ‘connectivity of the capitals’: Evidence from integrated reports".  The price was awarded by the organization committee Prof. Manfred Schwaiger, Prof. Robert Obermaier und Prof. Stefano Zambon at the 21st September 2018 in Munich. This year's edition of the conference took place at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. The conference is organized under the patronage of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management and is characterized by its interdisciplinary nature. During this year's edition 60 papers were presented and discussed.

The paper discusses the connectivity of financial and non-financial information in integrated reports and the drivers of companies' decisions on the extent of the disclosed connectivity of the capitals. Hereby, the paper focuses on the key idea of integrated reporting to connect financial and non-financial information and not to disclose it in isolated corporate disclosures (like financial reports or CSR reports). This shall enrich the decision usefulness for report users and decrease information asymmetries between companies and report users. Thereby, the paper adds to the emerging research area of integrated reporting as the integrated report framework was published just recently in 2013. Based on a manual content analysis of 169 integrated reports the authors develop a metric measure on the disclosed connectivity of the capitals and reveal that the extent of the disclosed connectivity of the capitals is associated with several firm-specific characteristics.

The authors are pleased to be awarded with the best paper award and would like to thank the reviewers for this honor.