Elliott, Grant, and Rennekamp (2014)

Elliott, W. Brooke, Stephanie M. Grant, and Kristina M. Rennekamp. “How Disclosure Features of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Interact with Investor Numeracy to Influence Investor Judgments.” Working paper (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), 2014.

From the authors’ abstract: “Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports typically frame their strategies in terms of either community or global efforts. Further, the style used to depict CSR performance in reports often highlights either pictures or words. These two prominent disclosure features of CSR reports promote a natural fit or misfit in the focus (relatively low-level or high-level) investors adopt when thinking about the firm and its CSR efforts. Further, these disclosure features likely have different effects on investors depending on their numeracy or, in other words, the way that they naturally process numerical information. In this study we predict and find that a fit between the strategy frame and the presentation style of a firm’s CSR report causes less numerate investors to be more willing to invest than when a fit is not present.“

Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2425731