Assessing the Sustainability of Construction Companies in Digital Context: An Econometric Approach Based on Financial, Social, and Environmental Indicators

The increasing pressure for transparency in corporate sustainability reporting, especially under frameworks such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards, has raised the need for sector-specific models to integrate financial, social, and environmental indicators coherently and measurably. This study proposes a composite econometric model to assess the sustainability performance of companies in the construction sector in a digital context, a domain that remains underexplored despite its substantial economic and environmental impact. Drawing on a sample of 1,600 Romanian construction companies over a ten-year period (2013–2023), the study develops a multidimensional sustainability score and tests its financial drivers using Ordinary Least Squares regression models. The model incorporates nine financial structure variables as predictors of sustainability outcomes across three dimensions - financial, social, and environmental - while ensuring robustness through heteroscedasticity and multicollinearity diagnostics. Results show that indicators such as return on assets, debt ratio, and equity structure significantly influence sustainability performance, particularly in the financial and environmental dimensions. In contrast, the social dimension exhibits lower explanatory power. The findings suggest that financial resilience plays a critical role in shaping sustainable practices in the construction industry and support the adoption of integrated models for performance benchmarking and policy alignment.