This paper focuses on the sustainability information voluntarily disclosed by Italian mutual banks or credit cooperative banks (CCBs) over the period 2015–2019. Our paper aims to contribute to the increasing debate on sustainability in banking sectors by investigating the quality of disclosure by Italian mutual banks, a peculiar non-profit category of banks which combine the value maximization for their stakeholders with the development of the local economy. We selected the Italian co-operative credit sector as it is one of the largest markets in Europe. We analyzed the quality of voluntary sustainability disclosure, in the light of the legitimacy theory, building an ad hoc framework which combines the three main CSR guidelines at international, national and local level (GRI, ABI and Federcasse) for Italian CCBs and content-analyzing each SR issued by the sampled CCBs. Our findings highlight a low general quality of the CSR information disclosure and a not homogeneous quality score for the different disclosed NFI category. Limits, future research directions and implications are provided.

中文翻译：

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意大利合作信贷银行自愿可持续发展报告的质量

本文重点关注意大利互助银行或信用合作银行（CCB）在 2015 年至 2019 年期间自愿披露的可持续发展信息。我们的论文旨在通过调查意大利互助银行的披露质量，为银行业可持续性日益激烈的争论做出贡献。意大利互助银行是一种特殊的非营利性银行类别，将利益相关者的价值最大化与当地经济的发展结合起来。我们选择意大利合作信贷部门，因为它是欧洲最大的市场之一。我们根据合法性理论分析了自愿可持续披露的质量，为意大利 CCB 建立了一个结合了国际、国家和地方层面的三个主要企业社会责任准则（GRI、ABI 和 Federcasse）的临时框架，并进行了内容分析抽样 CCB 发布的每个 SR。我们的研究结果突显了企业社会责任信息披露的总体质量较低，以及不同披露的 NFI 类别的质量得分不均一。提供了限制、未来的研究方向和影响。