EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Institutional Investors, CSR Report Readability and the Moderating Role of ESG Performance

Philip Teng Lin, Yanhui Jin, Fei Gao, Ruifeng Yang and Qian Lin

SAGE Open, 2023, vol. 13, issue 4, 21582440231208514

Abstract: This study examines the impact of institutional investors on the readability of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports in the Chinese polluting industry. All available CSR reports in the listed polluting industries in China from 2010 to 2019 are analyzed to develop a readability score for each company. To differentiate the heterogenous motivation of institutional investors, we classify institutional investors into long-term and short-term investors based on their holding purpose and trading frequency. The results show that long-term institutional investors with long-term horizons have strong motivation to engage in the CSR reports disclosure. However, short-term institutional investors pursue near-term interests and they may have weak incentives to participate in the corporate governance and improve CSR report readability. Furthermore, we also find that the positive relationship between long-term institutional investors and CSR readability is stronger in polluting firms with higher environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. The significant role of institutional investors in promoting CSR reporting highlights the importance for polluting firms to acknowledge the needs of large and influential investors.

Keywords: CSR report; readability; institutional investors; legitimacy theory; stakeholder theory; ESG performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440231208514 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:13:y:2023:i:4:p:21582440231208514

DOI: 10.1177/21582440231208514

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-05
Handle: RePEc:sae:sagope:v:13:y:2023:i:4:p:21582440231208514