Who pays attention to sustainability reports and why? Evidence from Google search activity

Abstract

We introduce country-level Google search activity as a direct measure of the level of stakeholder attention directed towards sustainability reports. We validate this measure by establishing that search activity for sustainability reports is correlated with temporal patterns in firms' supply of these reports. To frame the economic magnitude of this search behaviour, we then show that the level of attention directed towards sustainability reports is very low compared to the level of attention directed towards financial and accounting information. Next, we examine two related research questions. First, we identify who pays attention to sustainability reports. We find, consistent with the enviro..