Determinants of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) disclosure: a study of Indian companies

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial performances and the extent of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) disclosure of Indian companies. The content analysis was used to analyse the ESG performance of the sample companies from their annual and sustainability reports. For this purpose, ESG disclosure index is constructed with the help of GRI framework, Clause 49 of listing agreement and relevant literature. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) method was used to examine the relationship between the ESG disclosure index and the independent variables, namely the financial performance, market performance, FIIs stake and leverage after statistically controlling the effects of a firm’s size and the industry type of the companies; results based on the formulated model indicated that financial and market performance have a positive and significant association with the level of ESG disclosure, whereas FIIs stake and leverage have a negative and significant association with the level of ESG disclosure. The findings are limited to the context of the study, and it was limited to Indian companies listed at Bombay Stock Exchange for the period 2013–2016. The sources of data in this study were companies’ annual and sustainability reports. The study may be constructive for organizations and statutory bodies to take into consideration in identification of corporate attributes that will enhance ESG disclosure, since it had been shown in literature that the voluntary corporate social responsibility and corporate governance reporting in India is generally low. In recent times, there has been an increase in ESG reporting, to address the increasing concerns of the stakeholders. Thus, this study will emphasize the level of activities through ESG reporting in Indian companies and help the government to ascertain the level of ESG activities through corporate social responsibility reporting among Indian companies. The study reveals the extent of the disclosure of ESG to companies annual and sustainability reports and constructed the CSR index based on GRI framework and Clause 49 of listing agreement.