Family Firms and Coupling among CSR Disclosures and Performance

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the behaviours related to the decoupling of the disclosed information on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and corporate sustainability, deepening these practices’ knowledge within family businesses. For this purpose, we defined decoupling as a gap between social responsibility performance (internal actions) and disclosures (external actions). For a sample of 33,809 observations for the period 2011–2019, corresponding to 5029 companies, 19% being family firms, our empirical evidence supports that family firms present a less wide gap between performance and disclosure, confirming the prevalence of socioemotional wealth dimensions in the decision-making of these companies. In firms without controlled shareholders, the quality of nonfinancial reporting could be understood as ambiguous, understanding that the most useful CSR information is found in the reports of family-owned companies.

Different Leaders in a COVID-19 Scenario: CEO Altruism and Generous Discourse

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Assurance of corporate social responsibility reports: Does it reduce decoupling practices?

“…The results, reflected in the third and fourth columns, allow us to observe that the effect of the adoption of the GRI standards makes it possible to reduce underperformance practices but has no effect on underdisclosure strategies. Firms that adopt silent practices may be omitting certain information so that their stakeholders do not create expectations that companies cannot meet later, and they cannot be accused of hypocrisy (Parra-Domínguez et al, 2021).…”

Are Environmentally Innovative Companies Inclined towards Integrated Environmental Disclosure Policies?

“…Later, we create a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 for those firms whose EnvGap is higher than 0 due to the companies having implemented more environmentally responsible policies and actions that they disclose in their reports. This procedure is used by Parra-Domínguez et al (2021). In Table 5, it can be observed that the most innovative companies from the environmental point of view are very likely to adopt strategies of silence in their reports in relation to certain information on their environmental performance (EnvInno: Coeff.…”