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Towards comprehensive corporate sustainability reporting: an empirical study of factors influencing ESG disclosures of large Czech companies

Ivan Balogh (Department of Strategy, Prague University of Economics and Business, Praha, Czech Republic)
Mohit Srivastava (EM Normandie Business School, Métis Lab, Le Havre, France)
Ladislav Tyll (Department of Strategy, Prague University of Economics and Business, Praha, Czech Republic)

Society and Business Review

ISSN: 1746-5680

Article publication date: 8 April 2022

Issue publication date: 20 October 2022

2263

Abstract

Purpose

Businesses nowadays face unprecedented pressures from stakeholder groups to become more transparent by issuing comprehensive reports describing their environmental, social and governance (ESG)-related activities, strategies and policies. This paper’s primary motivation is to understand which ESG disclosure factors are relevant for large Czech companies.

Design/methodology/approach

To achieve the above-stated goal, the total ESG disclosure index, consisting of three subindexes (ESG) was constructed and calculated for the 100 largest Czech companies. Furthermore, the relationships between firm-level factors and ESG disclosure indexes were estimated by using censored regression models.

Findings

This study found that revenue, number of employees and profitability positively influenced the total ESG disclosures. On the level of the three ESG components, this study found that revenue positively impacted environmental and governance disclosures while the number of employees positively affected social and governance disclosures. Moreover, profitability affected social and governance disclosures positively for large Czech companies. However, this study did not observe a significant relationship between board attributes and ESG disclosures.

Originality/value

This paper extends academic literature on ESG disclosures by verifying the significance of firm-level factors in the context of Czech business realities before the adoption and transposition of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. More specifically, this study has investigated the ESG reporting together and separately for ESG factors. This separation is vital as firms vary in reporting processes across these factors.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editor in chief Prof Debbie Haski-Leventhal and the anonymous reviewers for the constructive comments that helped to improve the quality of this paper.

Citation

Balogh, I., Srivastava, M. and Tyll, L. (2022), "Towards comprehensive corporate sustainability reporting: an empirical study of factors influencing ESG disclosures of large Czech companies", Society and Business Review, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 541-573. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-07-2021-0114

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited

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