Publikationen

Unsere Forschungergebnisse unterstützen die gesellschaftliche Debatte rund um aktuelle finanzökonomische Fragestellungen. Durch die Veröffentlichung der Arbeiten in internationalen Fachzeitschriften und unserer Working Paper Series sollen diese für einen möglichst breiten Adressatenkreis zugänglich werden.

HFRC Working Paper Series

Unsere Arbeitspapiere fassen die neuesten Ergebnisse aus der Forschungsarbeit des Instituts zusammen. Die Papiere stellen Diskussionsbeiträge dar und sollen zur kritischen Kommentierung der Ergebnisse anregen.

Alle Working Papers

Disclosure Policies

The sustainability committee and environmental disclosure: International evidence

Hamdi Driss, Wolfgang Drobetz, Sadok El Ghoul, Omrane Guedhami
HFRC Working Paper Series | Version 08/2023
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 environmental 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. We also find that raising the quality of environmental disclosure leads to a lower cost of equity capital only for firms with sustainability committees in place. Our findings suggest that sustainability committees play an important role in facilitating and certifying corporate environmental disclosure.

Foreign institutional investors, legal origin, and corporate greenhouse gas emissions disclosure

Wolfgang Drobetz, Simon Döring, Sadok El Ghoul, Omrane Guedhami, Henning Schröder
Journal of Business Ethics | 01/2023
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.

Corporate social responsibility disclosure: The case of international shipping

Wolfgang Drobetz, Anna Merika, Andreas Merikas, Mike G. Tsionas
Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review | 11/2014
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.