Publikationen

This paper contributes to the growing debate about the role of board-level sustainability committees, focusing on whether they leverage sustainability expertise for impactful environmental initiatives or purely serve as symbolic actions aimed at greenwashing. Using a large set of firms from 35 countries over the 2010–2017 period, we find that the presence of a sustainability committee is positively associated with higher-quality GHG emissions disclosure. This finding is robust to endogeneity and sample selection bias concerns. The sustainability committee effect is more pronounced when external environmental institutions are too weak to properly monitor corporate environmental disclosure. Our findings suggest that sustainability committees are not a symbolic management tool, but play a crucial role in enhancing corporate environmental disclosure.

This paper shows evidence of a positive relationship between institutional dual holders, who hold both equity and debt in a firm, and voluntary greenhouse gas (GHG) emission disclosure. Considering dual holders as particularly risk-sensitive institutional investors, we docu-ment that voluntary GHG emission disclosure improvements are motivated by not only cli-mate-conscious but also risk-related considerations. The positive effect of institutional dual ownership is more pronounced when firms face severe environmental risks, where disclosure enables explanations and prevents exaggerated stakeholder reactions. The impact of dual ownership is also stronger in firms with poor information environments, where dual holders exploit their salient monitoring capacity from gathering information from their public equity and private debt holdings. Supporting our risk-based explanation, voluntary GHG emission disclosure reduces the cost of equity and increases firm valuation in firms with higher dual ownership.

The disclosure of corporate environmental performance is an increasingly important element of a firm’s ethical behavior. We analyze how the legal origin of foreign institutional investors affects a firm’s voluntary greenhouse gas emissions disclosure. Using a large sample of firms from 36 countries, we show that foreign institutional ownership from civil law countries improves the scope and quality of a firm’s greenhouse gas emissions reporting. This relation is robust to addressing endogeneity and selection biases. The effect is more pronounced in firms from non-climate-sensitized countries, for which the gap between firms’ environmental standards and investors’ environmental targets is potentially larger, and in less international firms. Firms with a higher level of voluntary greenhouse gas emissions disclosure also exhibit higher valuations.

Based on practices and legislation in the shipping industry, we construct a corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure index for listed shipping companies. We use Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques for Bayesian inference, and we estimate the marginal effects of firm characteristics on CSR disclosure for each firm. Our results show a positive relationship between CSR disclosure and financial performance for each firm in our international sample. Firm size, financial leverage, and ownership structure are also associated with CSR disclosure. Our findings suggest that a majority of listed shipping companies have integrated CSR practices into their strategic planning and operations.