Booking Sustainability: Publicly Traded Companies as Catalysts for Public Goods Provision in Brazil

This study assesses the extent of public goods provision by Brazilian firms and how this behavior has changed over time. We use text data of publicly traded companies’ annual standardized financial declarations from 2010 and 2022 and apply natural language processing techniques to extract ESG (environmental, social, and governance) keywords related to the provision of public goods. Context and sentiment analyses were used to supplement the information extracted from the raw keyword counts; these analyses were conducted using diverse regression techniques. We found a pronounced increase in keyword mentions over time; in particular, “responsibility” and “sustainability” appeared more frequently. Virtually all firms became more dedicated to ESG practices, particularly those that had a low frequency of ESG mentions in a positive context. Overall, it seems that large Brazilian corporations have embedded comprehensive ESG policies into their business practices, thus aligning their strategies with those of pioneering multinationals.