Disclosure of corporate social responsibility: a comparison between traditional and digital reporting. an empirical analysis on italian listed companies

During recent years there has been an increase of Corporate Social Responsibility (following CSR) disclosure not only through sustainability reports, but also through digital reporting. The purpose of our research is to study the CSR disclosure made by a sample of Italian listed companies. In particular, we built a disclosure index based on CSR disclosure in the sustainability report (traditional reporting) and a disclosure index based on CSR disclosure on the website (digital reporting). Our aim is to verify if there is a convergence between the two communication tools or whether companies prefer one of them. Specifically, we want to verify if digital reporting has really improved the quality and the level of voluntary disclosure. Our findings revealed that the CSR disclosures were generally shallow and unsystematic, indicating that online CSR reporting of our sample is still in infancy.