Empirically Investigating the Disclosure of Nonfinancial Information: A Content Study on Corporations Listed in the Saudi Capital Market

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is well structured, the ideas are presented concisely, in a logical order. The chosen theme is very interesting. I appreciate mentioning the efforts made by the European Union to publish non-financial information by large companies, and the need to publish this information in view of the many scandals that have shaken corporations in various countries over time.

The article has a very good potential to be published, requiring some major adjustments

1. The results obtained must be presented in a discussion section. This section also presents the conclusions of other studies that confirm or refute the results obtained by the authors.
2. The conclusions section should be considerably extended and should mention the economic policy measures proposed by the authors, the limits of the research and the future research directions.

Author Response

We have responded to all comments, please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Empirically Investigating the Disclosure of Nonfinancial Information: A Content Study on Corporations Listed in the Saudi Capital Market, has a lot of workloads in this area.

The study investigates whether Saudi corporate reporting disclose nonfinancial information. And the study investigates the annual report and board of directors’ report for the year 2019 of the energy, utilities, and materials sectors to examine their nonfinancial disclosure, which is Representativeness.

However, this article has the following serious problems, which would be further considered by the author:

1. Citations are inconsistent:
2. Some of them are cited with vol., some are not.

For example:

1. Some of authors are connected with &, some are connected with “and”.

For example:

1. First line indent has different format in many paragraphs:

For example: the first and second paragraph in section 2.4.

The points a.b.c. are just examples, there are too many formatting errors in this manuscript.

2. The innovation of the manuscript is not clear. Authors mentioned “ This study contributes to our knowledge on whether corporate reporting discloses non- financial information in the Saudi capital market.” The disclosure of nonfinancial information with voluntary does not necessarily have information content, and authors didn’t notice this view in the whole empirical studying. If there is no effectiveness of non-financial information with voluntary, the study is lack of academic significance.
3. The conclusion is more intuitive and has strong limitations. The author mentioned in the conclusion that “However, as reported in this study, one may conjecture that the average of disclosure may have been steady since 2012 without major improvements.”, As the author said, the conclusion analysis of this article still lacks realistic references value.
4. Different companies or even the same company in different periods may have inconsistent calculation calibers of non-financial information indicators, thus lacking comparability and affecting the accuracy of empirical results. What authors should do is multiple robustness analysis, to ensure the reliability of empirical evidence for such studies. But this research didn’t do these work.

 

Author Response

We have responded to all comments, please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors improved the manuscript but the conclusions section should be considerably extended and should mention the economic policy measures proposed by the authors. 

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript according to your comments, please see the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper focuses on a topic of interest and the results may be useful to both academia and other stakeholders.I am grateful to the author for referencing my suggestions and making relevant modifications. However, the manuscript needs some refinement before it can be published. My advice in this regard is:

1.Add/modifty the keywords to fit the core content of this paper；

2.Add more specific discussion in section 4 based on these tables；

3.Add some robustness to ensure the significance of these result

Author Response

We have revised the manuscript according to your comments, please see the attachment, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf