Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: A Descriptive Study across Industries

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (hereafter, CSR) reporting has become an international trend. We examine the CSR reports of ten S&P 500 companies across different industries in the U.S. We find that while these CSR reports share many commonalities, differences in structure and content exist. These differences may make it difficult for financial statement users to compare firms’ social performance according to their CSR reports, especially firms from different industries. Our findings suggest that it might be helpful to promote a universal standard for CSR reporting to ease the cross-industry comparison of corporate social performance.