Ejemplos de Planes Parciales en el contexto nacional e internacional Tendencias Actuales.

The focus of this study is on listed companies operating in Bulgaria. This country was chosen because a research gap still exists regarding the topic of CSR disclosure and because providing CSR information is still voluntarily there. This allows the comparison of the incentives for CSR disclosure between companies sharing the same operational context.

Following the legal framework in Bulgaria, companies listed on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE) are obliged to publicly disclose financial and corporate information on their websites and in their annual reports on a regular basis determined by law. In addition, these companies are required to follow the principles of the Bulgarian National Code for Corporate Governance, which aims to strengthen the competitiveness of Bulgarian companies and to make the country more appealing to foreign investors through good corporate governance practices20. According to this Code, corporate boards should maintain effective relations with the stakeholders, which involves disclosing information on CSR, among other things21. In addition, public companies have a higher number of stakeholders compared to privately held companies, which again raises the issue of information asymmetry as discussed in the previous sections. By taking these considerations into account, it could be expected that companies listed on the BSE would disclose higher levels of CSR information and were therefore selected as units of this analysis.

The target firms had to meet several selection criteria in order to be included in the final sample. First of all, the focus is on companies, which have disclosed CSR information either on their websites or in corresponding reports, or both. Therefore, a manual search for disclosed CSR information was conducted on firms’ webpages and annual reports. Initially, the study aimed at examining CSR disclosure mainly in annual reports. However, companies in Bulgaria rarely disclose CSR information in their annual reports or CSR information was detected in a very few annual reports. As a result, following these criteria would have constrained significantly the sample size. Therefore, CSR information provided on corporate websites was also examined and corporate websites were used as a source of CSR disclosure. Moreover, the observed annual or CSR reports, when available, were also accessible on the webpages. In this regard, only firms with a functioning website as of 2016 were included in this research. However, subsidiaries, which shared the same website with their parent company, were manually excluded during the sample selection process, since the provided CSR information refers rather to the holding company. In addition, only companies with available financial and ownership data for the reference period 1 January – 31 December 2016

20_{http://www.bse-sofia.bg/?page=CodeGovernance&language=en}

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were taken into account. Overall, the main sampling strategy consists of seven steps, i.e. included were active (1) listed companies as per2016 (2) that are registered in Bulgaria (3), have available websites (4) and financial accounts for 2016 (5), as well as available ownership data (6), and which are not public authorities or non-profit organizations (7). After applying the selection criteria on Orbis, the major source of corporate information in this study, a list of 252 companies that form the sampling frame appeared. From these 252 companies that have been manually observed, only 51 or ca. 20% provide CSR information on their webpages or/and in their annual reports. Thus, the final sample of this analysis consists in total of 51

companies, which meet all criteria. This sample represents 14% of the 358firms listed on the

BSE in 2016.

Table 5 Sample composition

Industry Foreign ownership Total

Yes No

Sensitive 9 17 26

Manufacturing industry 8 15 23

Mining & Construction industry

1 2 3

Non-sensitive 11 14 25

Wholesale & Retail industry

1 4 5

Finance, Insurance, & Real

Estate industry 3 4 7

Agriculture, Forestry &

Fishing industry 1 0 1

Transportation,

Communications, Electric, Gas, Sanitary & other Services

6 6 12

Total 51

As shown above in Table 5, 26 of the companies belong to sensitive industries and 25 to non- sensitive, as most companies operate in the manufacturing (23 firms) and services industries (12 firms). In addition, 20 firms are foreign-owned. The greatest share of companies with foreign shareholders operates in the manufacturing industry, and thus in a sensitive industry.

70 5.2. Data collection

Major source of financial, ownership and industry data required to measure the independent and control variables in this study is Orbis, which is a database with information on about 300

million companies worldwide22. Orbis is selected not only because it is available to students

of the University of Twente but also because it provides comprehensive information on financial indicators, ownership structure and company reports. In case of missing values, data from annual reports is used when available. As mentioned in the previous section, the CSR variables are measured by using data from corporate websites and annual reports, where information on CSR activities has been exposed. With regards to annual or CSR reports, CSR information has been considered only from the reference year 2016, while the data provided on corporate websites is often from unspecified time periods.

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6. Results

This chapter aims to present and discuss the results of the statistical analysis. The descriptive statistics are described in the first section. Then, a correlation matrix of the independent variables is presented and the t-test results are discussed in the second section, while the results of the OLS regression are provided in the third section.