No. 165: Targeting Transparency: Early Evidence on Mandatory Adoption of European Sustainability Reporting Standards

European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) constitute the most comprehensive introduction of mandatory ESG reporting globally to date. We propose to study its first-order effects on firms’ sustainability-related transparency, measured based on granular data points, rich narrative context, as well as firms’ exercise of adoption choices and discretion. For about 1,000 EU firms implementing ESRS for the first time in 2024, we will provide detailed descriptive evidence on ESRS-induced transparency changes as well as difference-indifferences analyses benchmarking these changes against global and U.S. peers. By integrating multiple sources of field evidence, pre-committing to a research design, and offering several open-science resources, we aim to provide relevant and timely evidence that facilitates future sustainability reporting research.