Corporate Social Responsibility reporting and accounting

This chapter summarizes the research on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) efforts and investments made by firms and how relevant research topics have been incorporated within accounting research. The term CSR has been widely used to describe explicit firm efforts to attain business sustainability, which can be manifested in efforts to avoid corporate actions and behaviors that harm stakeholders to the firm other than capital providers, or actions that aim at promoting causes beneficial to a set of stakeholders beyond the providers of financing. The chapter differentiates between CSR performance and disclosure, along with research that focuses on various CSR performance versus disclosure outcomes. The adoption of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) by the EU in 2021 is expected to change the terminology employed by the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) to explicitly state sustainability reporting, and the mandatory nature of producing relevant reports for large and medium firms is expected to be audited. Accounting research on CSR has consistently shown that CSR performance and reporting are significantly associated with financial reporting and firm performance outcomes and the value-relevance of reporting to stakeholders by integrating financial with sustainability information. This research provides support for anticipated regulatory changes by showing the importance of providing adequate assurance about the quality of sustainability information.