Individual investors’ perceptions versus managers’ beliefs on CSR materiality

Both academia and financial society are questioning the sustainability of current corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure practices to provide effective, reliable, and transparent information as measures for investments. An increasing interest of many investors is in combining ethical decisions, social and financial interests. Investors seek for an appropriate reporting framework that would allow them to benchmark and effectively use disclosed information. Although recently companies tend to provide more complete CSR disclosure, this increase in quantity is not associated with higher quality of information. There is a substantial mismatch between the corporate supply of non-financial CSR information and the investors’ demand for it. We understand very little about how managers make CSR disclosure decisions, what information they voluntary disclose, and how investors react to such disclosures in the context of investment decision-making. The purpose of this project is to explore two sides of materiality of CSR disclosure in publicly available sources by focusing on investor and manager perspectives.