Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure for Financial Institutions

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) disclosure levels of the financial institutions have been increasing consistently since the introduction of this concept; hence, it is important to understand the reasons behind this phenomenon. This research aims to identify firm-specific determinants on the CSR disclosure for financial companies at the United Kingdom. Our study brings a new perspective to the literature by utilizing from a multi-theoretical framework; including Agency, Legitimacy and Stakeholder theory; to determine the independent variables of our model, those are, size, leverage levels, economic performance and corporate governance performance of the companies. Also, we define the dependent variables of our model, CSR disclosure, in a more comprehensive way in comparison to many previous studies. CSR scores of companies, is obtained from Asset4 database that considers wide range of publicly available sources.This research confirms that size, corporate governance, and economic performance of companies have a significant positive relationship with CSR disclosure which shows that CSR performances of companies are related with visibility levels, political costs, and stakeholder perspective.