An empirical study on the impact of sustainability reporting on firm value

Abstract

Value relevance is an attractive exploratory topic for firms due to its influence on a firm's competitiveness. Investigating potential factors that have an impact on firm value can provide management with the insights in how to enhance value. The aim of this paper is to explore the association between sustainability reporting and firm value to gain an awareness of the value relevance of sustainability disclosures. The study concentrates on large listed German firms as research objects to reduce the influence of firm size, legislation and geographic differences. Moreover, instead of observing diverse sustainability reporting guidelines in one research, this paper focuses on the current most popular guidance, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). With this focus, it is more likely to achieve a relevant comparability among the firms' sustainability reporting. This concentration also leads to the main research question of whether large listed German firms which have a higher adherent level to GRI guidance tend to have greater firm value. The research applies Multiple Regression to test the above relationship by involving 485 observations from 97 large listed German firms within the research period from 2013 to 2017. Along with the main model, a robustness test was performed to explore the connection in the context of a four-month period after the year-end deadline to issue sustainability reports in accordance with German Law. The findings indicate a significant negative relation between firm value and a firm's GRI adherent level of sustainability reporting.