The Relationship between Corporate Sustainability Performance and Firm Value: Emphasizing the Role of Disclosure Score and Firm Size

Sustainable development represents an ethical concept related to the fight against poverty and protecting the environment simultaneously and on a macro-level. Corporations, as major actors, have a particularly substantive role to play in the process of achieving sustainable development. The sustainable business operation and its reporting promote the company's image among its stakeholders. The continuous development has led to companies publishing different types of sustainability-related content and reports along with annual reports.In recent years, corporate sustainability has gone main stream, and many companies have taken meaningful steps to improve their own sustainability performance. Corporate sustainability is essential to long-term corporate success and it has the potential to improve the transparency and reliability of information for investors and stakeholders. This research aims to investigate the relationship between corporate sustainability performance and firm value by emphasizing the role of disclosure score and firm size. 

Using a theoretical framework combining stakeholder, signal, and legitimacy theories and a resource-based perspective, a set of hypotheses were developed regarding the relationship between corporate sustainability performance and firm value. The panel data for the study was collected from 92 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) between 2013 and 2019 and analyzed using the robust regression method. 

The research findings revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between the financial (economic dimension) and non-financial dimensions of corporate sustainability performance (social, governance, environmental, and ethical dimensions) and firm value, and the effect of sustainability performance on firm value is greater in corporates with higher sustainability performance. The findings also confirm that the effect of sustainability performance on firm value is greater in corporations with a higher disclosure score, and the effect of sustainability performance on firm value in large and small companies is almost equal. 

The results of this research indicate that sustainability activities would be a worthwhile use of corporate resources for firms. These results support the conclusion that there are incentives for some types of firms to invest more heavily in corporate sustainability programs because such investments help to maintain the firm’s competitive position.The achievement of this research is that it investigates the relationship between corporate sustainability performance and firm value and the role of determining factors in this regard, providing valuable insight into the usefulness of sustainability activities in firm value creation.Considering that sustainability reports have valuable benefits such as improving the level of accountability and transparency of company operations, improving the overall image of the company in society, strengthening social relations and legitimacy of company activities, aligning company activities with community expectations, influencing current and future community welfare, helping companies participate in global financial markets and attract foreign investors, and the possibility of more accurate financial forecasts and better portfolio risk assessment for capital market participants, this issue should be considered at the micro and macro levels by the government and capital market regulators and standards and necessary guidelines and supervisory strategies to improve the sustainability performance of companies should be developed by relevant organizations.