Events

Dr. Rui Shen
Associate Professor of Accounting
Shenzhen Finance Institute, School of Management and Economics
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

This registered report seeks to provide descriptive evidence on the changing global landscape of ESG disclosure in annual reports. We are interested in how voluntary forces and mandatory regulations have jointly shaped ESG reporting practices over the past two decades. We collect a large sample of annual reports between 2001 and 2019 for publicly listed firms in 30 regions around the world from Refinitiv Global Filings. Using word embedding model, we compute a broad set of ESG disclosure attributes, including disclosure intensity, numerical disclosure, disclosure similarity across firms, disclosure stickiness, and the distribution of ESG disclosure within an annual report. We validate our main ESG disclosure measure using multiple approaches and then examine three questions. First, we explore the time trends of ESG disclosure attributes as well as the relative popularity of each ESG topic. Second, we study the evolution of ESG disclosure surrounding the adoption of mandatory regulations. Finally, we construct measures for green and social washing to provide descriptive evidence on the prevalence of such behavior.