CSR disclosure in Finland: Does comprehensive reporting enhance financial performance?

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability have been rising topics in the contemporary business environment over the recent years and disclosing on sustainability have become increasingly important. While some countries have legislation mandating companies to report CSR, other countries leave the decision of reporting to the companies themselves. There are numerous ways of reporting and communicating on sustainability activity and the quality of the reports can deviate heavily between companies. Theories such as stakeholder theory and legitimacy theory suggest that entities reporting comprehensive responsibility information can achieve better financial results than their non-reporting peers. There has been a myriad of studies conducted on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial performance. Despite the great number of research, there have been only a few studies that have investigated the true effect of CSR disclosure. The best way for a company to communicate their sustainable agenda is to disclose it for their stakeholders. Therefore, we took it upon ourselves to fill this research gap by investigating if level of CSR disclosure has a substantial impact on corporate financial performance. We approach CSR reporting from a stakeholder perspective, which to our knowledge have not been done before. This study examines 189 Finnish companies that are selected from a list of the 500 largest companies in Finland. These companies are divided into the subgroups GRI, CSR, and non-CSR, depending on their level of CSR disclosure. The financial information used in this study are comprised from the time period 2015-2019 and gathered from the database Orbis by Bureu van Dijk. This study investigates if there exists a relationship between level of sustainability reporting and the financial performance ratios ROA, ROE, Sales growth, and Profit margin. We find that there exists a strong positive relationship between the subgroup GRI and ROA and ROE, which implies that companies see a clear financial benefit from providing comprehensive CSR reports. Contrary, we find an increasingly negative relationship with sales growth as level of reporting increases, which suggest that CSR implementations stagnates growth. Profit margin showed a neutral behavior across all three groups. Overall, we conclude that there exists a relationship between the level of CSR reporting and financial performance, but that the results are mixed.