Sustainability Reporting and Investors’ Behaviour in the Oil and Gas Firms Listed in the Nigerian Capital Market (Published)
Discussions on sustainability reporting and climate change have continued to dominate research space unabated due to the importance attached those matters. Investors use sustainability performance to evaluate the extent of the responsibility of firms and also as a basis for making their investment decision. Behaviours of investors in the capital markets are influenced by many factors. Consequently, this study investigated how sustainability performance disclosure influences investor’s behaviour in the capital market. The independent variable of the study was sustainability performance disclosure which was broken down into environmental sustainability performance disclosure, social sustainability performance disclosure and governance sustainability performance disclosure; while the dependent variable was the investor’s behaviour which was measured by market capitalisation. The population of the study consisted of all listed oil and gas firms in Nigeria Exchange Group while a sample of six firms were purposefully selected. The study utilised secondary data extracted from the annual reports of the selected companies, through contents analysis based on the checklist developed by the researcher based on the work of other researchers, for the period of 2015 to 2022. The data were analysed with correlation and multiple regression using SPSS version 20 packages. The results of the analyses indicate that a low significant positive relationship between environmental, social and governance sustainability performance disclosure and market capitalisation, though the relationship was insignificantly low for social performance disclosure. The study concluded that sustainability performance disclosure influences the behaviour of investors in the Nigeria capital market. The policy implication of the study is that firms that disclose sustainability reporting in their annual reports are likely to attract more investors. The study recommends amongst others that firms should deliberately increase their disclosure of sustainability performance reporting in order to attract investors to their shares and therefore increase their market value.
Keywords: Nigerian capital market, Sustainability performance disclosure; investor’s behaviour; market capitalisation; oil and gas firms