Emerging economy multinational firms: Discovering topics and trends through the automatic content analysis of CSR and Annual reports

The purpose of this paper is to examine the CSR and Annual Reports of the largest emerging economy multinational firms (Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and Thailand) and provide evidence about their socioenvironmental performances disclosure. We read a sample of 200 EMNEs Reports in order to define, through a Grounded Theory approach, a dictionary of 1,049 keywords, which has been then validated by external coders. We grouped the final list of 963 keywords in 18 categories. Finally, we used this custom dictionary to set an automatic content analysis of 1624 firms’ CSR or Annual Reports, which range from 2000 to 2013. We have seen that the disclosure of social and environmental activities differ across countries and throughout the years. In particular we have noticed that, from 2000 to 2013, the attention towards environmental activities has increased in spite of social activities. Future research lines are then presented.