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Purpose -Is the natural environment a stakeholder of the firm? And is there a business case for achieving sustainability? The purpose of this paper is to trace a tripartite relationship, involving environmental disclosure, environmental performance, and financial performance of environmentally sensitive activities of companies in a European setting. Design/methodology/approach -A sample of 60 of the largest European Union industrial business groups, extracted from the FTSEuroFirst 300, and an environmental disclosure index inspired by the Global Reporting Initiative Guidelines, form the basis for the content analysis of the most recent sustainability reports published before the end of 2008. Findings -A significant association is found between contemporaneous environmental performance and disclosure, in that bigger polluters tend to disclose more on their activities, but only to a moderate statistical effect. However, no association is found between environmental performance and financial performance, as well as between environmental disclosure and contemporaneous firm performance. Practical implications -This result suggests that even though big polluters tend to report more, the transparency level of their activities may not be sufficient for a viable assessment of sustainability. For such "environmentally challenged" companies, their reputation-building strategy is mainly focused on preserving or repairing legitimacy. Originality/value -The paper considers two complementary aspects: first, that the relationship between sustainability commitment and financial performance may be so weak that it is barely detectable; and second, that cross-sectional studies may fail in capturing a relationship that is normally shaped over longer periods of time.

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Research Question: How do ESG and financial performance indicators vary according to different classifications of European banks? Motivation: Banks’ ESG performance and its relationship with corporate financial performance represents a field of continuous interest for researchers and practitioners. The results of previous studies are still mixed, either positive, negative, or even neutral. What’s new? The novelty of this paper is represented by the statistical comparison of variables that measure the ESG and financial performance of European banks based on three classifications that we propose (i.e. the geographical regions of Europe, functional currency, and cluster analysis on GDP and population of European countries, respectively). To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies applied to the banking sector, analyzing the selected variables between groups of banks according to the aforementioned classifications. So what? We contribute to the field by extending Thomson Reuters’ grouping of banks (Emerging and Developed Europe) with three more classifications. The comparison of ESG and financial performance data contributes to practice by highlighting which parts of Europe contain the banks with the highest and respectively the lowest values of ESG and financial performance, controversies, and audit fees. Therefore, the results will help investors, policymakers, regulatory bodies, bank managers, and auditors to acknowledge the significant differences within Europe and adopt appropriate measures that could improve the financial and sustainability performance of banks. Data: We collect data from Thomson Reuters Eikon, World Bank statistics, and EuroVoc for 108 European banks (81 from Developed Europe and 27 for Emerging Europe) for 2018, the most recent year on which all information is available. Tools: We conduct a cluster analysis on the macroeconomic variables of the study: the GDP per capita and the population. We used group tests and the ANOVA test as methods in analyzing the results. Findings and Contribution: We contribute with a quantitative study that fills the gap in the literature regarding significant differences that are obtained in ESG and financial performance of banks classified as Developed Europe versus Emerging Europe; Eurozone versus non-Euro countries; Western, CEE, Northern, and Southern banks; small GDP – large population and large GDP – small population clusters. Our methodology will improve future research in adopting better and more transparent classifications of companies analyzed at an international level.

This paper aims to produce an original model distilling a conceptual framework for sustainability reporting. Two levels of information reliability are described, derived mainly from accounting conceptual frameworks, and global reporting initiative (GRI) guidelines. We follow an inductive approach: we analyse the qualitative characteristics of specific environmental indicators, in order to assess the degree of relevance and reliability of each particular provision. We will finally make an attempt to derive the objective of sustainability reporting, while evaluating the degree of usefulness of this type of documents that closely follow the more formalised process of financial reporting. We conclude that there are a number of reasons for not reporting; most of these are related to internal data reliability. Hence, stakeholders cannot distinguish between different types of data unreliability; and the GRI does little on this matter.

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