Study of economic, environmental and social factors in sustainability reports using text mining and Bayesian analysis

The increase in the number of corporate environmental reports (CERs) along with the growing interest among the various stakeholder groups created a new challenge to the researchers, academics, regulators and legislators, in measuring the effectiveness of these reports. The present study intends to measure the CERs in terms of economic, environmental and social performance indicators using Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. A large sample (N=2415) is used to perform text mining so as to analyze the reports to come up with a scoring. The significant contribution made in the present study indicates that by adopting the GRI guidelines, it is observed that global CERs is now undergoing fragmented reporting in its incremental approach. Bayesian estimate confirms the probability that the true value of all the selected variable parameter falls within the confidence interval of 95%.