Identification of material sustainability indicators in the exchange industry using qualitative content analysis

The purpose of this paper is to identify the most important sustainability indicators and criteria of the exchange industry. Due to the importance of this industry in capital formation, price discovery, risk sharing, liquidity of securities, financing, regulation and supervision of listed companies and consequently its important role in contributing to sustainable economic development, in this study, sustainability reporting of exchanges are taken into consideration. To identify important sustainability criteria, 45 sustainability reports published by 26 exchanges around the world have been examined using inductive logic in the qualitative content analysis method. A full review of these reports has led to the identification of 10,523 codes, 388 sub-criteria, and 38 main criteria under 4 dimensions (economic, social, corporate governance, and environmental). The results of this study indicate that the economic criteria are the most important and the environmental ones are the least important in this industry which can be explained by the type of exchanges activity and their importance in economic growth and development as well as their low environmental impacts. As we know, this study is the first in-depth study in the field of identifying the sustainability criteria in the exchange industry at the international level, and its findings can be used as a framework for measuring, evaluating and reporting the sustainability performance of exchanges.