Sustainability disclosure and performance : an empirical study of U.S. petroleum corporations

Abstract

This thesis investigates if some of the largest U.S. petroleum companies’ written disclosure regarding sustainability is correlated with their sustainability performance. We measure the companies’ written disclosure with textual data analysis, conducted on annual reports (10K), event reports (8-K) and sustainability reports. Furthermore, we represent the sustainability performance with the indicators greenhouse gas emissions, total recordable incident rate and environmental expenditures, which represent the environmental, social and economic dimension of sustainability, respectively. We find that the companies’ combined written disclosure is not correlated with the companies’ sustainability performance. However, when analysing the disclosure document measures individually, we observe that how much the companies write about sustainability correlates less with their performance, compared to when they write positive or negative.