Evaluating the quality of sustainability disclosure and its impact on sustainability performance based on the theory of legitimacy

Evaluating the quality of sustainability disclosure and its impact on sustainability performance based on legitimacy theoryAbstractThe aim of this study is to evaluate the quality of sustainability disclosure and its impact on sustainability performance. In this regard, content analysis has been used to measure the sustainability disclosure of companies. In order to perform content analyze, a checklist tool consisting of 34 components and 104 indicators were used to describe the criteria for disclosure identification. The sample of the present study, which has been selected by systematic removal method, includes 130 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange for the years 2012 to 2018. This applied research is of a descriptive-correlation type. To analyze the data, Eviews Econometrics Software and a multivariate linear regression model have been used to test the hypotheses. The research hypotheses test results showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between the quality of sustainability disclosure, amount of high quality sustainability disclosure and sustainability performance, but no negative relationship was observed between low quality sustainability disclosure and sustainability performance. In other words, in the Iranian capital market, the proposed components and indicators related to sustainability disclosure are not considered very important and attention is not paid to the quality of sustainability disclosure. Therefore, the evidence obtained in this study showed that the reporting quality of sustainability disclosure in Iran is lower than foreign research.