ESG disclosure patterns in the Baltics

Abstract

The goal of this article is to provide evidence on the volume of ESG disclosures of 34 companies listed on the NASDAQ Baltic stock exchange. It provides a broad view of the non-financial disclosure thoroughness and offers conclusions on the key characteristics of the Baltic listed companies in terms of ESG. By performing content analysis of the publicly available reports based on 106 ESG criteria and statistical analysis of the retrieved data, the disclosure patterns across reporting dimensions, industries, and company characteristics are analyzed. Authors find a wide range (8% to 67%) ESG transparency scores with an average of 41%. On aggregate, governance and social dimensions are reported better (49% and 44%) than environmental (24%). Correlation analysis was performed to test the correlation between ESG and selected financial metrics revealing that the ESG disclosure score correlates with the firm’s market capitalization.