Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: An Empirical Study of Polish Listed Companies

Abstract

Abstract:In this paper we explore whether a number of elements influence the levels of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in the annual reports of Polish companies. These elements include the following: company size, profitability, financial leverage, industry environmental sensitivity, board size, women on the board, internationalization, and reputation. We use content analysis to determine the quality of CSR disclosures. We test our hypotheses using a Tobit regression analysis on a sample of 60 reports from Polish companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. We find industry environmental sensitivity to have significant influence on CSR disclosures. Our research findings also reveal a relationship between company turnover, duration of the stock exchange listing, inclusion in the Respect Index portfolio and foreign capital share, and the level of CSR disclosures. This study extends the scope of previous studies by including non-commonly used independent variables: the company's internationalization and reputation. To the authors' knowledge, it is the primary step to investigating CSR reporting practices coupled with the corporate characteristics in a Central and Eastern European country such as Poland. The paper contributes to the understanding of determinants of CSR disclosure and offers findings which are potentially useful for both theory and practice.

CSR Disclosure in Polish-Listed Companies in the Light of Directive 2014/95/EU Requirements: Empirical Evidence

“…Consistent with previous studies [37,[39][40][41][42][43], our research revealed a significant variability in CSR disclosure across industries. Companies in the basic materials, oil and gas, and energy sectors report CSR information most frequently.…”

“…Cronbach's alpha coefficient indicated very high reliability of our CSR measurement concept. We believe that our instrument enriches the literature examining content analysis of CSR disclosures, due to it having a different construction to those proposed in the literature [19,37].…”

“…Our research is based on the legitimacy theory, which is extensively used in studies related to CSR reporting [37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. One of the most commonly cited definitions of legitimacy has been formulated by Lindblom [44], who defines legitimacy as "a status, which exists when an entities value system is congruent with the value system of the larger social system of which the entity is a part.…”

Board Governance and Sustainability Disclosure: A Cross-Sectional Study of Singapore-Listed Companies

“…The high-impact sectors are agriculture, air transport, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, construction, food and beverages, forestry and paper, mining and metals, oil and gas, shipping, and water. Moreover, many studies observed a higher level of sustainability reporting for environmentally-sensitive industries [7,43,[45][46][47]. Therefore, we expect sustainability efforts to be better reported in the high-impact sectors in Singapore.…”

Corporate Disclosure, Materiality, and Integrated Report: An Event Study Analysis

“…Specifically, previous studies have searched for the factors affecting the level of corporate disclosure, while underlining the relevance of variables such as the organization's size and typology, the information asymmetry risk of the market (influencing the potential assumption of opportunistic behaviors), the professional degree of the intermediary agencies (affecting the credibility of the information disclosed), the board composition (also in terms of the presence of women), or the traditional attitude of the management (whose hostility toward the costs of voluntary disclosure may be mainly reduced by strong economic incentives)-e.g., [29][30][31][32][33][34].…”