Effect of Sustainability Disclosure on Financial Performance of Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria

This paper looks at how sustainability disclosure affects the financial performance of deposit money banks (DMBs) in Nigeria. The paper checks the single effect of social sustainability reporting (SSR), environmental sustainability reporting (ESR), economic sustainability disclosure (ECSD), and corporate governance disclosure (CGD) on bank profit. The study uses 11 listed Nigerian deposit money banks from 2010 to 2025, giving 176 bank-year points of data. Disclosure was measured with Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) content analysis, while financial performance was measured with return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), net interest margin (NIM), and return on capital employed (ROCE). Firm size and leverage were used as control variables. The paper used pooled OLS, fixed effects (FE), and random effects (RE) panel regression, and the Hausman test was used to pick the best model for each equation. The Hausman test picked the fixed effects model in all four cases. The result shows that ESR has a good and significant effect on ROA, NIM, and ROCE. SSR has no significant effect on any of the four measures. ECSD has a bad and significant effect on all four measures. CGD also has no significant effect on any measure. Firm size pushes performance up in all models, while leverage pulls performance down. The paper says that regulators and bank managers should pay more attention to the quality of environmental disclosure, since this is the one type of disclosure that keeps helping bank profit in Nigeria.