Analysing Social Responsibility in Financial Companies

Abstract

Although it is an accepted methodology to exclude financial companies from any comparative financial analysis of a sample of companies when performance is being analyzed, and this exclusion is due to the different financial structure of such organization, it seems to have also become standard practice to exclude such companies when the analysis of corporate social disclosure is also being undertaken. The justification seems to have been merely transplanted without any firm rational ever be in produced. This paper challenges this transfer of practice to show by theoretical and empirical analysis that the same assumptions do not hold and that all organizations are similar when the analysis of corporate social disclosure is also being undertaken.