Financial Factors Influencing the Quality of Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management Disclosure: A Quantile Regression Approach

Abstract This paper revisits the influence of companies’ financial factors on the extent of corporate environmental sustainability reporting (CESR) in an impressive sample of 3931 companies operating in 51 industries and 59 countries. A CESR composite index is constructed for each company that focuses on the G3 core environmental indicators from the Global Reporting Initiative because they are material for most organizations. In a methodological innovation, this study employs a quantile regression that unfolds certain interesting effects of financial drivers on the intensity of CESR that have not previously been revealed. Considering a combination of the main underlying theories of corporate sustainability reporting – legitimacy theory, agency theory, political costs theory, and signal theory – offers a better understanding of the complex structure of the dependencies found among factors such as company size, leverage, return on assets, research and development spending, market return and market capitalization, and commitment to environmental reporting. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment