What influenced the lack of diversity in CSR after the company's losses: evidence from topic modeling

Abstract: The diversity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure is a crucial dimension of corporate transparency, reflecting the breadth and resilience of a firm's social responsibility. Using CSR reports of Chinese A-share firms from 2006 to 2023, this paper applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract topics and quantifies disclosure diversity using the Gini-Simpson index and Shannon entropy. Regression results show that corporate losses significantly compress CSR topic diversity, consistent with the slack resources hypothesis. Both external and internal governance mechanisms mitigate this effect: higher media attention, stronger executive compensation incentives, and greater supervisory board shareholding attenuate the loss-diversity penalty. Results are robust to instrumental variables estimation, propensity score matching, and placebo tests. Heterogeneity analyses indicate weaker effects in firms with third-party assurance, those disclosing work safety content, large firms, and those in less competitive industries. Our study highlights the structural impact of financial distress on non-financial disclosure and provides practical implications for optimizing CSR communication, refining evaluation frameworks for rating agencies, and designing diversified disclosure standards.