Public and private universities tasked with incorporating principles of social responsibility (SR) into their activities face the multiple challenges of addressing expectations of diverse stakeholders, establishing mechanisms for dialogue, and achieving greater information transparency. This article has two goals: first, to analyze whether SR has become an essential element in activities associated with university accountability, information transparency, and the use of the Internet; second, to analyze whether SR is used by universities as a differentiating factor in relation to their status. A comparative study of public and private US universities shows that neither is strongly committed to the online disclosure of SR information, including in relation to sustainability-related activities. Moreover, there is a uniformity in the accountability activities of both university types, suggesting that the challenges are not being faced, and SR is not being used as a differentiating factor in the pursuit of positional or competitive advantage.

The search for enhanced transparency and accountability in government organizations has inspired studies to identify the key factors that facilitate greater disclosure of public financial information. With the advantages provided by the meta-analysis technique, applied to a sample of studies, we identify the most significant factors and incentives underlying the decisions adopted by public managers on policy strategies regarding information transparency and public responsibility. Our study shows the variables analyzed to be positively associated with the disclosure of public financial information, but also that this depends on the context in which the research is carried out. The most influential variables were the moderator variables of the administrative culture and of the measurement unit for the variables.

Various studies have sought to obtain a measure of the financial health of local authorities, via the concept of financial condition. However, in measuring this latter concept, two serious problems need to be addressed: The first concerns the inclusion or otherwise of socioeconomic variables in the proposed evaluation models, and the second, the difficulty of measuring the solvency in the level of services provided. Therefore, the authors have created a methodology to measure the financial condition of a local authority, including a variable to measure the quality of the services received by the population, and present a new treatment for the variables of the socioeconomic environment so that the financial and socioeconomic factors can be integrated. The application of this method to a sample of Spanish local authorities reveals its capability of minimizing the effects of the socioeconomic environment and maximizing the value of benchmarking, making comparisons between local authorities simpler and more effective.