Abstract: We employ computer‐based textual analysis to examine disclosure patterns for a sample of US corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports from the period 2002–2016. Starting from 466 features commonly used in computational linguistics, our results show that the linguistics or disclosure patterns in CSR reports can be used to accurately predict the actual CSR performance type of CSR reporters. Specifically, we find that the two most commonly used disclosure characteristics, number of words and number of sentences, alone can be used to predic...
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