Hållbarhetsredovisning – en hållbar affär?

Sammanfattning: Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to examine if there are financial purposes for companies to create sustainability reports, by comparing the quality of sustainability reports with profitability for swedish public companies, listed on Nasdaq OMX Stockholm, that are subject to the 6 chapter 10 § Annual Accounts Act by the year of 2018, that earlier haven’t created a sustainability report. Methodology: Quantitative research with deductive reasoning where the statistical methodology is made up of regression analysis with bivariate linear model with companies Corporate Social Performance (CSP) as independent variable and companies Corporate Financial Performance (CFP) as dependent variable. CSP is made up of the operationalization of companies’ sustainability report which is measured with a custom-made index that has been made up with a combination of requirements from the 6 chapter 12 § Annual Accounts Act in Swedish regulation, previous CSP research, legitimacy and stakeholder theory. CFP is an operationalization of the company's profitability and is measured by three accounting-based profitability measures, ROE, ROA and ROS. The statistical result is analyzed and interpreted on the basis of the study's theoretical framework and previous research, which leads to the rejection of the study's hypotheses. The analysis's arguments lead to the study's conclusion. Theoretical perspectives: Woods (CSP) framework, Legitimacy theory, Stakeholder theory. Empirical foundation: The empirical foundation starts with a presentation of the descriptive statistics in order to give a perception of the material of the study collected from the annual- and sustainability reports of 136 Swedish companies. Further on is the statistic analyze of the material, which is represented in commented diagrams. Conclusions: There is no relationship between quality of sustainability reports and profitability of Swedish public companies covered by the 6 chapter § 10 Annual Accounts Act in 2018, but who did not report sustainability before 2016.