There is extant research on theorization, conceptualization, determinants, and consequences of corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, what firms include in their CSR or sustainability reports are much less covered and are predominantly covered in case studies of individual firms. In this paper, we instead take a holistic view and simultaneously explore what firms around the globe currently disclose in these reports, more specifically we investigate if firms are shareholder or stakeholder focused. In this investigation, we check the alignment of the reports to the materiality framework of Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) which was developed having shareholders as the intended user. To estimate what firms disclose in CSR reports we used the unsupervised Bayesian machine learning approach latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) developed by Blei et al. We conclude that firms target shareholders as the intended users of these reports, even in environments where stakeholder approach of management is argued to be more dominant. Methodologically, we contribute by demonstrating that topic modeling can enhance the objectivity in reviewing CSR-reports.

We develop a novel and generic text-based measure to classify and evaluate greenhouse gas (GHG) disclosures. We construct the measure using collocation analysis of GHG-related words and regular expressions. Automated implementation achieved high concordance compared to manual investigations. We move beyond the “bag-of-words” approach in classifying voluminous nonfinancial corporate disclosure. We also outline a methodology that is manyfold scalable and makes replicability straightforward. Compared to past studies, we work with a significantly larger sample of 5,017 reports across 80 countries, thereby dealing with greater complexity and leading to better generalizability. We also contribute to the debate on whether nonfinancial disclosures exhibit accountability or are merely greenwashing. We find a negative trend in accountability worldwide, and firm-level accountability in GHG disclosures is not detectable in a country-level reduction of GHG emissions. Moreover, firms disclose significantly higher accountable information in a civil-law legal environment compared to those in a common-law legal environment. JEL Classifications: M14; M40.