Which Integrated Reporting Disclosures Matter for Financial Performance? Evidence from Listed Commercial Banks in Kenya

ABSTRACT : Integrated reporting is intended to connect financial and non-financial information in explaining how organisations create value, yet evidence on its financial relevance remains mixed. Anchored in Signalling Theory and Stakeholder Theory, this study examines whether financial capital, operational and stakeholder-oriented disclosures in one year are associated with the subsequent financial performance of commercial banks listed at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, Kenya, and whether firm size conditions the overall reporting-performance relationship. The study used a quantitative descriptive and correlational design based on secondary data from ten listed commercial banks. The full measurement dataset comprised 50 bank-year observations from 2020 to 2024. To examine future performance, disclosure and firm characteristics for 2020 to 2023 were matched to Return on Assets (ROA) for 2021 to 2024, producing 40 one-year-ahead bank-year pairs. Disclosure depth was measured using 15 items grouped into financial capital, operational and stakeholder-oriented dimensions. Internal consistency was acceptable to excellent across the three dimensions and the overall scale. Pearson correlations, multiple regression, moderation analysis and bank-cluster-robust sensitivity checks were used. All three disclosure dimensions were positively correlated with subsequent ROA. In the adjusted model, financial capital disclosure and operational disclosure were not statistically significant. Stakeholder-oriented disclosure was positive and significant under conventional inference (B = 5.182, p = .027), although this significance was not retained with bank-cluster-robust standard errors (p = .105). Firm size significantly moderated the relationship between the overall Integrated Reporting Disclosure Index and future ROA; the interaction was negative under both conventional inference (B = -1.984, p = .032) and the cluster-robust sensitivity test (p = .003). The findings show that the financial relevance of integrated reporting is neither uniform across disclosure dimensions nor constant across organisational scale. The study contributes a temporally ordered and disaggregated analysis of integrated reporting in an emerging-economy banking context and identifies firm size as an important boundary condition.