Social Responsibility Accounting and Financial Performance of Banks in Nigeria: Beyond Stakeholder Theory
The increasing interest in and global emphasis on social responsibility accounting and financial performance in the 21st century call for a look beyond the stakeholders’ theory that underpins its practice. It subtly suggests an inquisitive co-relational look from the perspective of financial performance. Hence, the study is motivated and premeditated to interrogatively investigate the nexus between social responsibility accounting and reporting and the financial performance of selected financial institutions in Nigeria, from 2013 to 2022.Consequently, the study adopted a panel-correlation research design, to purposively extract relevant data from annual accounts and reports of all the deposit money banks that were listed on the floor of the Nigerian Exchange Group as at 31st December, 2022, for multiple regression analyses with an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag model. The results revealed that social responsibility accounting and reporting dimensions such as expenditures on scholarship and educational support, youth and sports support, public health projects, ecological protection projects and social welfare projects are positively connected to the profitability of deposit money banks in Nigeria, but at different levels of significance. The study therefore, concludes that though at varying levels of significance, the selected social responsibility accounting and reporting dimensions are positively connected to financial performance and constitute a potential strategic initiative and advantage, as well as factors in the determination of financial performance. Accordingly, the study recommends amongst others that deposit money banks should strategically integrate social responsibility accounting and reporting initiatives into their short-term and long-term goals and core operations, and expand their social…