Corporate sustainability disclosure in annual reports: Evidence from UAE banks: Islamic versus conventional

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to measure the degree of the corporate sustainability disclosure using annual data for listed banks in the UAE financial markets during the period 2003–2013. The results show that the overall level of sustainability disclosure based on sustainability reporting for banks listed in the UAE financial markets is at a low level. The results also show that the degree of the corporate sustainability disclosure of the conventional banks is higher than the Islamic banks. In addition, our empirical results reveal that the sustainability disclosure affects significantly and positively the banking performance of the conventional banks while no significant effect on the Islamic banks performance.