Muslu, Mutlu, Radhakrishnan, and Tsang (2014)

Muslu, Volkan, Sunay Mutlu, Suresh Radhakrishnan, and Albert Tsang.  “Measuring Corporate Social Responsibility Report Quality Using Narratives.”  Working paper (University of Houston), 2014.

From the authors' abstract:  "Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports vary considerably in their quality largely due to their voluntary nature and the lack of an accountability framework in CSR reporting. We develop a CSR report quality measure using the tone, readability, length, numerical content, and horizon content of the reports’ narratives. We find that our quality measure is positively associated with CSR performance ratings and CSR transparency ratings issued by KLD database as well as equity analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy."

Link (published version):  https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/corporate-social-responsibility-report-narratives-and-analyst-fo/11971406