Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosures by Environmentally Visible Corporations: A Study of Selected Firms in Nigeria

Abstract

This study basically investigates the association between corporate environmental visibility and the level of corporate social responsibility disclosures among listed firms in Nigeria. The attribute or proxy used as a measure for environmental visibility in this study is size and it is measured by the total asset of the selected firms. To achieve the objective of this study, a total of 30 selected listed firms in the Nigerian stock exchange market were used. Also, the study critically developed and utilized a disclosure index to measure the extent of corporate social responsibility disclosure made by companies in their corporate annual reports for the period 2006-2010. The simple regression analysis was used to test the research propositions in this study. The study observed that there is a significant association between the corporate environmental visibility and the level of corporate social responsibility disclosures among listed firms in Nigeria. This finding further revealed that environmentally visible firms disclose more environmental information in their annual reports in order to legitimate their operations and to avoid political costs derived from public scrutiny.

Keywords: corporate disclosure, Environmental visibility, corporate social responsibility, Size