Board characteristics, varieties of capitalism and corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure: a European study

This study explores the relationship between board characteristics, varieties of capitalism and global, environmental and social disclosure, using the agency and institutional theories. Our empirical research concerns a sample of 5 062 firm-year observations of 717 European companies from 2013 to 2023 and belonging to the STOXX600 index. Our result show that firm-level characteristics are decisive in explaining disclosure, compared to the country-level characteristics and varieties of capitalism. We also highlight the importance of several factors in promoting transparency, regardless of the dimension (overall ESG disclosure, environmental or social): women on board, existence of a CSR committee, board independence, board size and board age. Employee on board (H8) and chairwoman (H3), as expected, lead to higher transparency, relating to the overall and environmental fields, but surprisingly have no impact on social reporting. Duality seems to have a negative impact only on the overall and social scores, but none relating environmental. Our study aims to enrich the existing literature, by (1) introducing variables, rarely used in previous research (employee representatives and CSR committee), (2) by considering environmental and social disclosure separately and (3) because we introduce the institutional context in our research approach.