Información social corporativa y sistema legal

Until relatively recent times, the only responsibility that companies had was to increase profits while fulfilling legal and ethical principles. However, growing public awareness of environmental problems and social inequalities has led organizations to include these criteria along with economic principles as parameters that determine how it acts.

Keeping in step, companies have begun to disseminate the suitability of this new way of behaving to society and other stakeholders through sustainability reports in which business practices are synthesized from the triple bottom line: economic, environmental and social.

Different authors argue that corporate transparency is determined both by a company's internal business characteristics and by the external factors representing its surroundings, which up to now have scarcely been analyzed, and given that previous studies have focused on specific countries with their own methodological idiosyncrasies.

In light of this situation, the objective of the present study is to show the influence that the legal system has on corporate transparency in matters of sustainability. Analysis of an unbalanced sample of 1,598 international companies for the period 2004-2010 using a Tobit methodology for panel data shows the strong impact of this institutional factor on the issuing of the most important and comparable information in matters of sustainability.