Banks within Europe have a major role in the European financial system. The financial collapse in 2008 made regulators well aware of the importance of corporate transparency to allow stakeholders to assess the banks health and maintain a stable market. Risk reporting within the European Union (EU) contributes to transparency in terms of disclosing information on risk management activities. The heavy regulations and demand from investors have caused the extent of risk reports to increase over time. The purpose of this research is to investigate if there is a relationship between the quantity of information in risk disclosures and the financial performance for banks in the EU and thus contribute with new knowledge to the field of finance, and increase managers' as well as stakeholders' understanding of the impact of risk reports. The methodological standpoints guide our choices throughout the research process. Our epistemological view is positivism and our ontological view is objectivism. A deductive research approach and a quantitative research method are adopted to collect archival data from risk reports and on financial performance from a sample of 41 banks. Our population consist of banks within the EU. The research design is cross-sectional using data from one point in time, the time period 2013-04-01 - 2014-03-31. Based on relevant theories and previous research, quantity proxies in terms of number of pages, words, characters and recurrence of keywords together with financial performance measures in terms of stock return, standard deviation and beta are used to investigate the relationship. 3 hypotheses are derived and tested by running regressions where the financial performance measures are the dependent variables and our proxies for quality are the independent variables. Our tests show that no significant relationship exists between the quantity of information in risk disclosures and the financial performance of banks within the EU. The results from our research contribute with new knowledge to academics within the field of finance by increasing the understanding of the explanatory variables for financial performance. Moreover, academics may use our results to justify the choice of other proxies than quantity when investigating quality in corporate disclosures. Additionally, our results indicate that practitioners should not use quantity of information in risk reports as an indicator of quality, as no relationship with the financial performance of a bank could be statistically proven.

Introduction: Information overload occurs when received information exceed the consumer's ability to process the information and the consumers are overwhelmed by the information. How the consumer can process the information and if the consumer will be overwhelmed depends on the quantity and quality of the information. There is a large amount of information on social media and social media is a crucial platform for companies to communicate to consumers, that can cause information overload, whereas the information consumer receives effects consumers purchase intentions. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to explain the effect information overload in terms of quantity and quality of information on social media has on consumers purchase intentions. Conceptual: The theory regarding information overload was conceptualised with the theory of consumers purchase intentions. This lead to the two hypotheses; H1: Information overload in terms of quantity of information on social media has a positive effect on consumers purchase intentions; H2: Information overload in terms of quality of information on social media has a positive effect on consumers purchase intentions. Methodology: The research approach used was deductive with a quantitative nature. Following, a questionnaire was formed and shared online in order to gather data to meet the purpose. The sample used was convenience- and snowball sampling and consisted of social media users. After collecting the data, 173 responses could be used and the answers was then analysed to get the results. Result: Both hypotheses could be rejected. H1, did not have a effect on consumers purchase intentions and H2, had a negative effect on consumers purchase intentions. Conclusion: When putting information overload in a social media context and its effect on consumer purchase intentions, the results differs compared to previous research of information overload in terms of quantity of information but not regarding information overload in terms of quality of information.

The corporate scandals in the beginning of the 21st century caused distrust in the market and a pressure for more disclosure to increase transparency. To broaden the traditional reporting, companies started to voluntarily disclose information regarding soft measures like Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Due to the fast development and popularity of CSR, more companies started to disclose a separate sustainability report to communicate information about these activities. The aim of the report is to provide stakeholders with accurate and transparent information regarding the companies CSR activities, but also to legitimize the business. The main purpose of this research is to investigate if the quantity of information disclosed in the sustainability report affects the financial performance of companies listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm. We also aim to investigate whether the existence of a report affects the financial performance. With companies spending an increasing amount of resources on disclosing voluntary information it is important to extend the research regarding CSR and the benefits to financial performance. This research ontological and epistemological positions are objectivism and positivism with a deductive approach. A quantitative method was used to gather sufficient data from existing databases and reports. For the first research question our population is all companies listed on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm on April 12th 2013, and for the second research question our population is the companies with a separate sustainability report in English from the accounting year of 2011. The financial performance data was gathered from the period 2012-04-01-2013-03.31. To answer our research questions and sub- questions, six hypotheses were formulated based on relevant theories and previous studies. Several multiple linear regression analyses were performed to examine the relationship between the existence of the reports, and the quantity of information in them, to the company’s financial performance. Other regressions were performed to establish if the quantity disclosed was affected by industry classification or market capitalization size. Our results show that the neither the existence of a separate sustainability report nor the quantity of information disclosed in it has an effect on stock return. However, both having a separate sustainability and the quantity of information disclosed have a positive effect on stock volatility. Conclusively, companies do not benefit financially from disclosing their CSR activities through a separate sustainability report.