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This paper aims to investigate the effect of corporate environmental disclosure on earnings management and to further examine whether this relationship is moderated by female board.

Our sample includes 264 European companies listed on the STOXX eUROPE 600 for the period 2010 to 2022. We excluded financial companies (banks and insurance companies) due to their specific capital structure and regulatory requirements, and companies with missing data. Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) regression method is used to estimate the econometric models. For robustness analyses, the authors included the alternative measure of the dependent variable, and they applied the simultaneous equation model for the endogeneity test.

Using discretionary accruals as a proxy for earnings management, the results obtained indicated a negative effect of corporate environmental disclosure on earnings management. The results suggest also that women on boards are effective in their monitoring role. Indeed, findings show that the effect of corporate environmental disclosure on earnings management is particularly stronger with the presence of women directors on the companies’ boards.

This study has two limitations. Firstly, the sample size is relatively small, which may limit the generalizability of our findings. Secondly, our earnings management indicator, based on estimates of accruals, may not perfectly reflect all streams of earnings management. Therefore, to reduce potential bias in these estimates, it would be useful to use other indicators, such as real earnings management.

The findings have several implications for regulatory, investors and academic researchers. For regulators, it is appropriate to promote several standards related to corporate environmental disclosure and earnings management. The results advise also the worldwide policy maker to give the importance of female roles to improve engagement firms in corporate environmental disclosure, so to be more transparent in their accounting practices to ensure that they are not engaging in unethical or fraudulent behavior. For investors, the results show that the existence of female directors on the board reduces earnings management. For academic researchers, it is interesting to explore the relationship between corporate environmental disclosure, women on the board, and earnings management.

This paper extends the existing literature by examining the moderating effect of women directors on the relationship between corporate environmental disclosure and earnings management in the European context.

This study aims to evaluate the adequacy of climate risk disclosure by providing empirical evidence on whether corporate disclosure meets rising stakeholders’ demand for risk disclosure concerning climate change.

Drawing on a triangulated approach for collecting data from multiple sources in a longitudinal study, we perform a panel regression analysis on a sample of multinational firms between 2007 and 2021. Inspired by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) principles, our innovative and inclusive model of measuring firm-level climate risks underscores the urgent need to redefine materiality from a broader value creation (rather than only financial) perspective, including the impact on sustainable development.

The findings of this study provide evidence of limited corporate climate risk disclosure, indicating that organisations have yet to accept the reality of climate-related risks. An additional finding supports the existence of a nexus between higher corporate environmental disclosure and higher corporate resilience to material financial and environmental risks, rather than pervasive sustainability risk disclosure.

We argue that a mechanical process for climate-related risk disclosure can limit related disclosure variability, risk reporting priority selection, thereby broadening the short-term perspective on financial materiality assessment for disclosure.

This study extends recent literature on the adequacy of corporate risk disclosure, highlighting the importance of disclosing material sustainability risks from the perspectives of different stakeholder groups for long-term success. Corporate management should place climate-related risks at the centre of their disclosure strategies. We argue that reducing the systematic underestimation of climate-related risks and variations in their disclosure practices may require regulations that enhance corporate perceptions and responses to these risks.

This study emphasises the importance of reconceptualising materiality from a multidimensional value creation standpoint, encapsulating financial and sustainable development considerations. This novel model of assessing firm-level climate risk, based on the GRI principles, underscores the necessity of developing a more comprehensive approach to evaluating materiality.

This paper aims to examine the effect of ownership structure variables on social and environmental disclosure practice in Nigeria. The paper also investigates the moderating impact of intellectual capital disclosure on the relationship between ownership structure elements, social and environmental disclosure.

The paper adopted the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) disclosure framework to extract social and environmental disclosure information from corporate social and environmental reports of 80 companies listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The study spanned from 2012–2017. Management ownership, foreign ownership, block ownership and dispersed ownership are considered as determinants of social and environmental disclosure. A multiple regression analysis was used to test the relationships specified in the study.

The result of the descriptive analysis has shown evidence of a low-level disclosure of social and environmental information in corporate reports (annual reports and corporate social and environmental reports) of companies. From the regression analysis, block ownership, foreign ownership and dispersed ownership are found to enhance the disclosure of social and environmental information in the corporate report of companies. However, management ownership was found to be insignificantly related to social and environmental disclosure. The result also revealed that intellectual capital disclosure has a significant positive effect on the relationship between management ownership, foreign ownership and dispersed ownership, social and environmental disclosure. However, intellectual capital disclosure does not moderate the relationship between block ownership, social and environmental disclosure.

This paper is the first to empirically examine the moderating effect of intellectual capital disclosure on ownership structure variables, social and environmental disclosure. The result of the study offer researchers a better understanding of the impact of ownership structure variables on social and environmental disclosure. The findings are useful to researchers, corporate managers, policymakers and regulatory bodies.

This paper was motivated by the current debate over the voluntary approach to environmental disclosures in corporate annual reports and assesses the effectiveness of the current policy of voluntarism in the UK. A brief review of the relevant theories, which explain why managers might choose to voluntarily provide environmental responsibility information to parties outside the organisation, is presented. With this background, the paper then questions whether the UK government’s faith in voluntarism and the pursuit of best practice will be enough to generate any real change in current environmental reporting practices. We argue that voluntarism is not effective and that there is an urgent need to introduce strict governmental regulations on the information that must be disclosed and the form in which it should be presented in corporate annual reports as have been established in several other countries. In addition, further consideration is needed to achieve reforms in academic accounting education in order to improve corporate accountability and transparency in corporate annual reports. Organisations need to respond to the growing demands for corporate social and environmental responsibility and this will be possible with the support of an accounting profession that takes a more proactive approach to engaging with stakeholders. For this to happen, we need to rethink the focus of accounting and business education. We must move away from the dominant model, which treats accountancy as a set of techniques, towards a more holistic approach which recognises the social and environmental impacts of organisational activity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate performance and social and environmental disclosure for two African leading countries namely, South Africa (common law country) and Morocco (civil law country).

The sample consists of 168 annual reports spanning from 2004 to 2009. A content analysis of companies’ annual reports is used to measure the extent of voluntary social and environmental disclosure.

Results show that social and environmental disclosure has a significant positive effect on corporate performance only in the South African setting.

The findings emphasize the need to explicitly consider the legal and institutional setting prevailing in each context. For instance, social and environmental organizations in South Africa enjoy more power to influence companies’ social and environmental reporting policy, whereas, their counterparts in Morocco, enjoy less power to place pressure on companies to incorporate social and environmental considerations into business operations.

This study aims to investigate the role of regional environmental transparency on corporate environmental disclosure.

This study uses the introduction of a nationwide automated air pollution monitoring network in China as a quasi-natural experiment and employs regression analysis. Robustness checks, including parallel trend test and placebo test, are performed to test the robustness of the results.

Sharing air pollution data with the public can improve corporate environmental disclosure. Firms with poorer environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance prefer to disclose less informative information after the automated network is implemented compared with firms with better ESG performance. The relationship between information sharing and corporate environmental transparency is more pronounced when local air pollution is severer, firms face stronger investor scrutiny and firms are from heavily polluting industries. The mechanism tests suggest the automated system can draw public environmental attention and improve governments’ aspiration for environmental governance. Finally, corporate environmental disclosure can reduce stock price crash risk and cost of equity.

Real-time pollution data reporting is an important solution to raising public environmental awareness and then enhancing the effectiveness of pollution control.

This study has implications for policy-making regarding environmental governance and environmental disclosure.

This study confirms that pollution information transparency can motivate firms to increase environmental disclosure.

Little is known of the actualities or possibilities of corporate social reporting in Thailand. This study aims to move towards an appreciation of this neglected but important area. This survey focuses on the annual reports of Thai companies, and thereby contributes to a tradition of related prior empirical work upon corporate social accounting practices which has to date largely focused upon English‐speaking and Western contexts. Its concern is to gain insights into and to critically appraise various dimensions of these annual reports, so as to construct a critique of corporate social disclosure in Thailand. Pursuing a critical perspective sensitive to the context of Thailand, it is concluded that the various aspects of the Thai accounting disclosure that are analysed are disabling, and more generally that the Thai practices explored fall short of their potential to function as enabling communication.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how policy uncertainty affect corporate environmental information disclosure.

This study conducts a difference-in-difference estimation and systematically investigates the relationship between policy uncertainty and corporate environmental information disclosure. The baseline regression results are robust to a series of robustness and endogeneity tests.

The authors show that firms located in cities with stronger policy uncertainty disclose less information on environmental issues. Furthermore, this negative relationship is stronger in the Midwest and in pre-industrial regions and for stated-owned firms and firms in highly polluting industries.

This study argues that policy uncertainty reduce the corporate disclosure of environmental information. Therefore, the results provide evidence on how to better emphasize the importance of green gross domestic product in the performance appraisal system for officials.

This study confirms that corporate environmental disclosure is a response to public pressure. The results encourage the government and the public to increase corporate awareness of environmental protection.

This study contributes to the literature in the following ways. First, the authors provide a new perspective to study the relationship between policy uncertainty and corporate finance. Second, it contributes to the literature on corporate environmental information disclosure by linking policy uncertainty with firms’ disclosure of environmental information. Third, this study is a serious attempt to solve the problem of endogeneity between policy uncertainty and corporate environmental information disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether managerial ability affects the quality of corporate environmental financial disclosures.

Regression analysis is used to examine the association between managerial ability and the quality of corporate environmental financial disclosures.

The results of primary empirical tests find a negative association between projection errors of corporate environmental capital expenditures and managerial ability. Overall results suggest that (1) managers appear to be equally capable of making relatively accurate projections of total corporate capital expenditures, and (2) managers with higher managerial ability are capable of estimating the projection amounts that appear to be significant, yet do not deviate substantially to what they intend to spend in the subsequent year(s) for legitimation purposes.

The data collected and analyzed include only publicly traded companies in the environmentally sensitive industries in the USA; therefore, the results should not be generalized to non-US listed, private and non-publicly traded businesses.

Results of this study provide practical implications for stakeholders in their decision-making. For instance, understanding how different levels of managerial ability affect corporate environmental disclosures quality assists the board of directors in their evaluations of the performance of current top management. Furthermore, when contemplating new laws, governmental agencies and legislators can consider how managerial ability might affect the likelihood of environmentally sensitive businesses to comply with full disclosure and other reporting requirements.

Information regarding top management’s ability to carry out socially acceptable environmental practices is very valuable for investors who are interested in socially responsible and green investing.

This study contributes to and links between two research streams: managerial ability in management literature and environmental financial disclosure literature. This is the first study that empirically tests whether the managerial ability is a determinant of the quality of corporate environmental financial disclosures.

This paper aims to examine the impact of corporate environmental transparency (CET) on corporate financial performance under a mandatory environmental disclosure policy in China, the largest carbon-emitting country. It aims to clarify the concept of CET and investigate its short-term financial implications for key pollutant-discharging entities (KPEs).

A multidimensional model is used to construct a comprehensive CET index for KPEs in China. Empirical tests are conducted to assess the relationship between CET and corporate financial performance.

The study finds a negative relationship between CET and corporate financial performance in the short term. Increased environmental transparency necessitates higher environmental resource allocation, adversely affecting profits. The results remain unchanged from a battery of robustness tests. Despite mandatory disclosure, companies tend to provide general and vague information rather than specific and meaningful environmental data.

The findings provide rich practical implications for policymakers to improve a mandatory environmental disclosure policy. The paper also contributes to the existing knowledge by developing a measure of CET and presenting new evidence to the debate on whether corporate environmental disclosure can be regarded as transparency.

Policymakers are advised to refine mandatory environmental disclosure regulations to ensure genuine transparency and to implement policy measures that alleviate the financial burdens of companies with high CET levels, thereby encouraging sustainable practices.

This paper contributes to the existing knowledge by developing a measure of CET and providing new evidence on the debate over whether environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure equates to transparency. It emphasizes the complexity of transparency and the inadequacy of current environmental disclosure practices among KPEs. The study underscores the need for financial support for companies with high CET levels to alleviate short-term financial strains and promote long-term sustainability.