Open research questions in Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting
1,099 gap statements mined from Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting papers in our 7.9M-paper local library, which holds 7,224 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.
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What the literature leaves open
The lack of transparency in ESG rating construction and the need for ML to verify their credibility. The challenge of distinguishing between score reconstruction, autoregressive forecasting, and out-of-time prediction in ESG research.
Predicting, Using, and Assessing ESG Signals: A Tripartite Systematic Review of Machine Learning in Sustainable Finance · 2026 · DOIThe lack of understanding of how purpose and CSR initiatives impact employee well-being.
The paper highlights the need to improve the standardization and credibility of ESG information disclosure.
Seeing Is More than Believing: ESG Performance Aspiration Gap and Institutional Investors’ Site Visits · 2026 · DOIThe need to verify the absence of multicollinearity in formative constructs. The challenge of evaluating indicator relationships in formative measurement models.
A methodological discussion on the scale of accounting culture: formative and reflective approaches · 2026 · DOIFuture studies may expand the scope to include a wider variety of countries and financial institutions. Future research could extend the rationale for focusing exclusively on linear moderation in the analysis. Future research could use alternative robustness checks in future iterations or extensions of the study, such as Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) approach.
ESG performance and financial performance in banks: a comparative analysis of China and the USA under environmental uncertainty and COVID-19 · 2026 · DOIResearch on the association between ESG performance and financial performance has attracted significant attention, but the underlying mechanisms remain underexplored. The study identifies a gap in the literature on the comparative analysis of ESG performance and financial performance in China and the USA.
ESG performance and financial performance in banks: a comparative analysis of China and the USA under environmental uncertainty and COVID-19 · 2026 · DOIThe quality and consistency of ESG disclosures are still topics of significant concern. There is a lack of empirical support for the interactive effects of stakeholder engagement and blockchain on ESG disclosure quality.
Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and ESG Disclosure Quality: The Moderating Roles of Financial Regulation and Stakeholder Engagement · 2026 · DOIThe research notes the limitation of relying on aggregated ESG indices, which may overlook the potential multicollinearity among the environmental, social, and governance pillars.
The Impact of ESG Performance on Financial Performance: Evidence from Listed Companies in Thailand · 2026 · DOIThe study does not establish a positive market-based relationship between ESG and Tobin’s Q. The sample is limited to Chinese A-share firms in heavily polluting industries. The study excludes financial and insurance firms, ST and *ST/delisting-risk observations, observations outside the firm's listed period, and observations missing variables required for the primary ESG and ROA models.
Green Initiatives and Financial Performance: ESG Associations and Corporate Life-Cycle Contingencies in China’s Heavily Polluting Industries · 2026 · DOIFurther research could explore the relationship between ESG and financial performance in other industries and countries. The study suggests that future research could investigate the role of disclosure, expectations, and measurement in the ESG-value relationship.
Green Initiatives and Financial Performance: ESG Associations and Corporate Life-Cycle Contingencies in China’s Heavily Polluting Industries · 2026 · DOIThe existing literature focuses on the volume of carbon disclosure rather than its quality. There is a lack of understanding of the association between disclosure quality and new quality productive forces among Chinese listed firms. The paper aims to fill this gap by examining the quality of carbon disclosure and its association with new quality productive forces.
Carbon Disclosure Quality, Stakeholder Accountability and Corporate New Quality Productive Forces: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms · 2026 · DOIThe existing literature has primarily focused on firms' productive and digital outcomes. There is a lack of research on the impact of computing infrastructure development on corporate ESG performance. The study aims to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between computing infrastructure development and corporate ESG performance.
How Does Computing Infrastructure Improve Corporate ESG Performance? Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms · 2026 · DOIFew studies have been conducted on the performance prediction of ESG indexes for Saudi listed companies. Most existing studies focus on developed markets or general sustainable equity indexes. There is a lack of studies integrating sustainability intelligence, investor relevance, and risk dynamics together as predictors of ESG Index Performance.
A Multimodal Explainable AI Architecture for Dynamic ESG Performance Prediction: Integrating Sustainability Intelligence, Investor Relevance, and Risk Dynamics in Saudi Listed Companies · 2026 · DOIThe literature on sustainability reporting has been characterised by fragmentation across industrial sectors. There is a lack of systematic reviews and meta-regression analyses on the relationship between sustainability reporting and organisational performance. The study identifies a need for research on the moderating factors that influence this relationship.
It highlights the need for organizations to adapt to emerging challenges and trends. The research identifies the importance of stakeholder engagement in shaping the relationship between CSR initiatives and organizational outcomes.
The Interplay of Corporate Social Responsibility, Innovation Capability, Organizational Learning, and Sustainable Value Creation: Does Stakeholder Engagement Matter? · 2024 · DOIIt must address the issue of missing financial data for key variables. The research needs to mitigate the impact of outliers, which is achieved by winsorizing continuous variables at the 1st and 99th percentiles.
The study notes that the energy sector faces complex challenges in meeting growing energy needs while minimizing environmental impact. The study also notes that energy firms face pressure to adopt sustainability initiatives and practices to show their dedication to sustainability principles. The study identifies the challenge of ensuring both sustainability and financial performance growth.
Assessing the Role of Sustainability Disclosure on Firms’ Financial Performance: Evidence from the Energy Sector of Belt and Road Initiative Countries · 2024 · DOIThe research may be limited by the small sample size of 11 industrial companies.
The study notes that the financial environment in China is still imperfect, and business firms commonly encounter the issue of financial constraints.
The Effect of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Performance on Corporate Financial Performance in China: Based on the Perspective of Innovation and Financial Constraints · 2024 · DOILimited visibility to studies in which ESG scores are consumed as inputs or in which ML is used to investigate rating construction, divergence, or credibility - High goodness-of-fit is not equivalent to predictive generalization - The review only considered peer-reviewed studies from Scopus and Web…
Predicting, Using, and Assessing ESG Signals: A Tripartite Systematic Review of Machine Learning in Sustainable Finance · 2026 · DOIThe study did not test one component of Gray's model, - The analysis was limited to the 500 Largest Industrial Companies in Türkiye, - The study used a purposive sampling…
A methodological discussion on the scale of accounting culture: formative and reflective approaches · 2026 · DOIThe study cannot support jurisdiction-specific or organization-level generalization - The absence of organization identifiers prevents a direct assessment of clustered observations - Elevated construct-level collinearity and HTMT values require caution in interpreting the structural effects - The study has a cross-sectional design, which may not capture longitudinal effects - The sample size is limited to 250…
Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and ESG Disclosure Quality: The Moderating Roles of Financial Regulation and Stakeholder Engagement · 2026 · DOILimited empirical evidence exists regarding how ESG scores translate into financial performance across sectors, - Most prior studies rely on aggregated ESG indices, overlooking potential multicollinearity among the environmental, social, and governance pillars, - Few studies employ causal inference techniques, leaving the directionality between ESG and financial performance ambiguous, - Concerns about endogeneity…
The Impact of ESG Performance on Financial Performance: Evidence from Listed Companies in Thailand · 2026 · DOIFurther research could investigate the causal relationship between disclosure quality and new quality productive forces, - Future studies could explore the role of institutional ownership and green finance in amplifying the association, - Research could examine the generalizability of the findings to other countries…
Carbon Disclosure Quality, Stakeholder Accountability and Corporate New Quality Productive Forces: Evidence from Chinese Listed Firms · 2026 · DOIA moderate risk of bias was identified in the data preprocessing procedures, feature selection techniques, and outcome definitions - Heterogeneity was further influenced in the meta-regression by variations in model validation strategies and the representativeness…
Most-cited papers in Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting
- A Stakeholder Framework for Analyzing and Evaluating Corporate Social Performance · Academy of Management Review · 1995 · 6,099 citations
- Corporate Social Responsibility: a Theory of the Firm Perspective · Academy of Management Review · 2001 · 5,781 citations
- Corporate Social and Financial Performance: A Meta-Analysis · Organization Studies · 2003 · 5,605 citations
- WHAT'S IN A NAME? REPUTATION BUILDING AND CORPORATE STRATEGY. · Academy of Management Journal · 1990 · 4,340 citations
- Corporate Social Responsibility · Business & Society · 1999 · 4,339 citations
- Corporate Social Performance Revisited · Academy of Management Review · 1991 · 3,964 citations
- A RESOURCE-BASED PERSPECTIVE ON CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE AND PROFITABILITY. · Academy of Management Journal · 1997 · 3,772 citations
- Voluntary Nonfinancial Disclosure and the Cost of Equity Capital: The Initiation of Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting · The Accounting Review · 2010 · 3,678 citations
- The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance · Management Science · 2014 · 3,531 citations
- “Implicit” and “Explicit” CSR: A Conceptual Framework for a Comparative Understanding of Corporate Social Responsibility · Academy of Management Review · 2008 · 3,439 citations
Most recent work
- Corporate ESG Profiles and Investor Horizons · The Journal of Finance · 2026
- The Nitty Gritty of Carbon Accounting: Enablers, Barriers, Reporting, and Strategies · Business Strategy and the Environment · 2026
- Media environmental coverage and corporate green innovation: A dual-mechanism test based on incurred regulatory pressure and institutional investors’ green attention · Finance research letters · 2026
- Reconfiguring green intellectual capital: environmental governance and strategic capitals in carbon disclosure · Journal of Intellectual Capital · 2026
- Symbolic or Substantive Action: Intent, Effort, and Results · Business Strategy and the Environment · 2026
- Greenwashing: Motivations, causes and consequences · International Review of Economics & Finance · 2026
- Sustainable development goals, accounting practices and public financial management: A pre and post COVID-19 assessment · The British Accounting Review · 2026
- Green Talk, Costly Walk: The Financial Cost of Greenwashing · Business Strategy and the Environment · 2026
- Can environmental courts inhibit corporate greenwash? Evidence from heterogeneous LLMs · International Review of Economics & Finance · 2026
- Why Firms Intend to Adopt ISSB Standards Before Regulation: Evidence From an Emerging Muslim‐Majority Economy · Business Strategy and the Environment · 2026
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