Determinants of voluntary CSR disclosure: empirical evidence from Germany

Currently, companies spend a great deal of effort on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosures. CSR disclosure relates to the provision of information on companies’ environmental and social performance. From an economic perspective, companies might disclose this information to avoid or decrease potential political costs. We construct a CSR disclosure index based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. Using content analysis, we analyze 130 listed German companies’ CSR disclosures (470 firm-year observations) to investigate the determinants of these voluntary disclosure activities. Our results show that, consistent with the political cost theory, German companies’ disclosures of all CSR issues are affected by their visibility, shareholder structure, and relationship with their US stakeholders. In addition, higher profitability is associated with more environmental disclosures. Finally, size and industry membership affect the amount of CSR disclosure.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Review of Managerial Science

• Publication date

  2011-07-01

• Fields of study

  Business, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/S11846-010-0052-3
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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