Niklas Letmathe

2026

The introduction of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) represents a significant regulatory intervention, sparking debate between hopes for increased transparency and fears of bureaucratic overload. This thesis examines the anticipatory effects on the Reporting Substance, Strategic Commitment, and Structure and Tonality of climate reporting by German companies. To isolate the regulatory effect from general market trends, this study employs a Difference-in-Differences design. By benchmarking German companies against a structurally comparable but less regulated Swiss control group and using the domain-specific language model ClimateBERT, the analysis systematically measures reporting quality beyond simple word counts.
The empirical results show that the anticipated CSRD mandate affects content and financial integration more strongly than targets and report structure. Compared to the Swiss control group, German firms constrain the growth of Disclosure Volume, experience a less pronounced decline in semantic specificity, reduce vague rhetoric, and significantly strengthen the integration of climate topics with financial data. In contrast, quantitative target setting shows a broadly parallel upward trend in both countries, with no incremental effect attributable to CSRD anticipation. This suggests that while the substance of reporting is improving under regulatory pressure, the structural implementation remains inconsistent during the transition phase. Consequently, this thesis finds evidence consistent with the view that the shift from soft-law guidance to binding regulation is consistent with disciplining the substance and financial integration of climate reporting, while leaving structural convergence as an open, longer-term process. This study contributes to the literature by combining a quasi-experimental design with transformer-based text analysis to identify anticipatory regulatory effects on climate reporting.