Relations between institutional environment and level of social disclosure in the banking sector: evidence from Latin America

The companies seek to legitimize their activities in corporate social responsibility through the dissemination of sustainability reports. The present study aims to verify the existence of relations between the institutional environment and the social disclosure of the Latin American banks listed in Forbes Global 2000, between 2015 and 2017. For this purpose, we analyzed 26 social indicators of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to characterize social disclosure. The institutional environment was characterized by six indicators of the World Economic Forum. In order to relate the dependent variable to the independent variables, four hypotheses were formulated, which were tested using statistical techniques. Evidence obtained in the research indicates that there is a positive relationship between the institutional environment and social disclosure. The results show that the higher the firm's profitability and its age, the higher the level of disclosure. We conclude that the results of the research corroborate previous findings.