The relationship between a company's sustainability practices and its financial performance has been investigated with different methods and from different theoretical perspectives. This study aims to answer the following questions: (a) Do investors react to the publication of sustainability reports on company websites? (b) Has the market reaction to the publication of the sustainability report increased in the last few years? In this study, 170 report disclosures were considered from 55 listed companies from all over the world in the period from 2009 to 2016. To analyze the impact of the report publications on the security returns, 33 different event windows were analyzed. Results show two significant event windows and an increasing level of significance in the reports released after 2013.

This research investigates what happens to sustainability disclosure in the light of an industrial disaster. Drawing from legitimacy theory, the disaster is treated as a moment of crisis, in which the relationship of trust between the company and its stakeholders suffers and has to be reconstructed to legitimise the company's operations once more. While past studies revealed an increase in corporate disclosure after a disaster, the authors' results highlight a different behaviour. The analysis focuses on six companies involved in industrial disasters with a global media coverage, before and after the event. The sample includes, among others, Tepco for the leakage of nuclear material from the Fukushima power plant and Carnival Cruise Corporation in relation to the sinking of the Costa Concordia. Findings obtained using text mining techniques suggest that there is a tendency to reduce the quantity of information provided in the year of the disaster, which represents a precise managerial strategy aiming to avoid further drops in corporate legitimacy.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse company sustainability disclosure in case of a legitimacy crisis. This work sets out to investigate how the negative externalities of an event reported widely in the media, such as the sinking of the Costa Concordia class cruise ship, have affected sustainability communication, for not only Carnival Corporation & PLC (the parent company of Costa) but also its most direct competitor Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. The paper relies on text analysis focusing on the sustainability reports of the two major companies (in terms of market share) in the cruise sector. Authors compared the reports of Carnival Corporation & PLC and its most direct competitor for a five-year period using text mining techniques. Results indicate that an event with social and environmental negative externalities, dominating international media and capable to bring discredit in the eyes of stakeholders, generates a change in the sustainability communication of both companies. Thus, repercussions are larger than one might suppose. Companies reduced the amount of information disclosed as a strategy to influence the perception of their audience, demonstrating that the provision of justifications, explanations and announcements of new sustainable policies (which increase the quantity of information) is not a predictable reaction. This paper undertakes empirical research on the sustainability reports of cruise line companies - which have been largely overlooked - and contributes to better understand company sustainability reporting praxis after an industrial disaster.