Corporate social and environmental disclosure in developing countries: Evidence from Iran

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the extent of social and environmental disclosure (SED) in corporate annual reports. Specifically, This is an exploratory study designed to examine the relationship between corporate social and environmental disclosure (CSED) and corporate attributes and firm-specific factors in a developing country, Iran. In order to do this, we use content analysis approach with sentence count for the level of disclosure measurement by looking into the annual reports of the 66 listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. The Panel analysis and econometric software EVIEWS 6 are used for analyzing data. The Results show that there is significant positive relationship between company size and level of CSED also there is significant negative relationship between environment sensitive industries and level of CSED. However, we did not find any relationship between profitability and the level of CSED.

Keywords

• Social and Environmental Disclosure
• Content Analysis
• Company attributes
• Developing Countries