What kind of visibility affects a firm's sustainability disclosure?

CSR research suggests that organizations engage in sustainability disclosure in response to stakeholder pressure. They do this in order to demonstrate that their actions are consistent with societal values while also gaining legitimacy to operate. This explorative paper investigates how the nature of a firm’s ultimate controlling owner - i.e. state, family or non-family - influences its disclosure behavior, taking into account different forms of visibility to stakeholders. We construct a continuous sustainability disclosure index for a sample of 230 Italian listed firms for each year of the period 2004-2013. Our results highlight that the nature of the ultimate controlling owner affects a firm’s different forms of visibility and its response in terms of the extent of sustainability reporting. More specifically, we find that state-controlled firms are more visible for the different stakeholder groups and that they respond to these pressures by means of a higher engagement in disclosure.