Assessing Corporate Environmental and Sustainability Reports Using Text Mining and Bayesian Estimate

Measuring the effectiveness of Corporate Environmental Reports (CERs) is considered to be highly complex. This is due to the fact that they are highly qualitative, less regulated and more diverse in its representation. The performance indicators used in these reports play a vital role and enhance the ability of the stakeholder to perform rational decision-making. This study intends to assess the CERs over the specific performance indicators (organization, environmental and social) using text mining and relevant statistical techniques. A large sample (N=2171) is used for text mining that was implemented in Java, along with Bayesian estimation. The results indicate that the environmental and social performance indicators differ across the industry, where as, organization performance remains the same. Using Bayesian estimation it is found that the correlation between the selected variables and its estimates are highly significant.