A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATED AND STAND-ALONE SUSTAINABILITY REPORTS – EVIDENCE FROM LATENT DIRICHLET ALLOCATION
Type
dissertation project
Status
ongoing
Description
I employ an unsupervised learning algorithm to investigate the thematic content of a large set of integrated and stand-alone sustainability reports. Subject to a non-financial reporting mandate, companies in the EU can disclose their non-financial performance together with financial information (integrated) or in a separate (stand-alone) report. In this paper, I compare 2,248 integrated reports and 3,567 stand-alone reports to identify and examine the topics that firms disclose when preparing the report. To do so I employ a topic model, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to examine the topics disclosed by firms issuing a report between 2015 and 2021. Comparing the outcomes of both types of report, I find that firms disclose, on average, more topics on social, governance and environmental matters when they issue a separate sustainability report relative to when they disclose their sustainability information in an integrated report. In subsequent analyses, I show that the readability of integrated reports decline, especially when the firm switches from a stand-alone to an integrated report decline. The analysis foremost contributes to the understanding of the differences in disclosure practices in Europe when firms prepare non-financial informatio
Member contributor(s)
Funder
Method(s)
Topic MOdeling
Range
HSG Internal
Range (De)
HSG Intern
Eprints ID
248224