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1. Introduction
Information disclosure by companies on the internet has increased over the last few years and is an increasingly popular topic for analysis among researchers, at the same time being of great interest to society at large. Whereas firms are obliged to disclose certain types of information in line with the legal stipulations of each country, there are also cases of voluntary disclosure, particularly in relation to economic, social and environmental aspects, also known as elements of corporate social responsibility (CSR). According to Cooper (2004) and Campbell (2007) CSR is a function of a company's behavior toward its different stakeholders, such as customers, suppliers, regulators, employees, investors and communities.
The spread of interest in CSR has led to the positing of a theoretical framework that has grown around its definitions and focusses on which of the existing theories can be applied to this topic, which is unquestionably becoming increasingly more important. Our analysis will thus range from classical theories to socio-political theories in an attempt to determine the one most suitable for our research.
Likewise, although the findings of previous studies show that more and more research is being devoted to analyzing the voluntary disclosure of CSR information, there is still no general agreement as to the indicators used or the determination of the variables that affect such disclosure.
The aim of this study is to analyze through the internet which indicators are used by companies from different countries for CSR disclosure, as well as the explanatory factors behind this voluntary disclosure. To do so, the indicators devised by the GRI, better known as the Global Reporting Initiative G3.1 (GRI G3.1, 2011), were taken as a point of reference, first because they are the ones most widely accepted internationally (Skouloudis et al. , 2009; Prado-Lorenzo et al. , 2009; Brown et al. , 2009; Rasche, 2009; Levy et al. , 2010; Roca and Searcy, 2012; Christofi et al. , 2012), and second because they are highly suited for our purposes since they consider the economic, environmental and social aspects of a firm (Gamerschlag et al. , 2011).
Our findings show that size is the most influential variable in the disclosure of CSR information in all the models; leverage only affects the disclosure of economic...