Purpose This study aims to analyse the relationship between countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures. To date, little attention has been paid to how specific climate change-related regulation influences companies’ climate change disclosures, especially voluntary carbon reporting. Design/methodology/approach The New Institutional Sociology perspective has been adopted to examine the pressure of a country’s climate change regulation on voluntary carbon reporting. This research uses Tobit regression to analyse data from 2,183 companies in 12 countries that were invited to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire in 2015. Findings The results show that countries’ specific climate change-related regulation does influence both the participation of its companies in the CDP and their quality, as measured by the CDP disclosure score. Research limitations/implications The sample is restricted to 12 countries’ regulatory environment. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other institutional contexts. Practical implications The results are of use to regulators and policymakers to better understand how specific climate change-related regulation influences voluntary carbon disclosure. Investors may also benefit from this research, as it shows which institutional contexts present greater regulatory stringency and how companies in more stringent environments take advantage of synergy to disclose high-quality carbon information. Social implications By linking regulatory and voluntary reporting, this study sheds light on how companies use voluntary carbon reporting to adapt to social expectations generated in their institutional context. Originality/value This is the first research that considers specific climate change-related regulation in the study of voluntary carbon disclosures.

This paper analyzes how the regulative, normative, and cultural dimensions of institutions exert pressure both on companies' decisions to voluntarily disclose environmental information and on the quality of the information disclosed. Prior research has focused on the influence of economic, disclosure, and generic institutional determinants, although little attention has been paid to the analysis of the influence exerted by climate change‐related institutional pillars. The results show that the three institutional pillars have different effects as regards both the decision to respond and the quality of disclosure. The regulative pillar positively influences the response decision but does not influence disclosure quality. The normative pillar positively affects both the propensity of companies to disclose and the quality of the information reported. Meanwhile, the cultural pillar positively influences disclosure quality, but it has no effect on firms' decisions to disclose environmental information. This paper is the first to analyze whether the institutional profile of climate change in different countries influences voluntary environmental disclosures.

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The previous literature has demonstrated that countries’ regulative contexts positively influence voluntary corporate carbon disclosures. However, little research has been conducted into the relationship between the different components of the regulative dimension of institutions and voluntary carbon disclosure. Drawing on the theoretical framework of New Institutional Sociology (NIS), this study examines the influence of the different components of the regulative context (rules; monitoring mechanisms and punishments; rewards) both on firms’ propensity to disclose carbon information and on the quality of disclosures. Based on a global sample of 2176 companies that participated in the 2015 Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) climate report, this paper uses the Heckman two-stage approach in an attempt to model firms’ decisions as to whether to disclose carbon information, as well as the quality of said disclosures. The results show that the regulative components positively influence firms’ decisions to voluntarily disclose carbon data. They also show that the quality of disclosures is positively affected by climate-related rules and rewards, but that it is not influenced by monitoring mechanisms and punishments related to climate change. This paper is the first to take the step of addressing the components of the climate-related regulative pillar of institutions in the same regression setting.

La literatura previa ha prestado poca atención a cómo influye la regulación específica de cambio climático en los informes voluntarios de carbono de las empresas, habiendo sido escasamente considerado, especialmente, el contexto europeo. Así, la novedad de este trabajo radica en la incorporación y medición de regulaciones específicas de cambio climático en el análisis de los informes voluntarios de carbono en el caso de los países europeos. Esto es importante, dada la proliferación de leyes sobre cambio climático en la Unión Europea. Basándose en la perspectiva teórica del Nuevo Institucionalismo Sociológico (NIS), este trabajo analiza datos de 1.089 compañías europeas que fueron invitadas a participar en el cuestionario Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) 2015. Los resultados revelan que la regulación de cambio climático afecta positivamente tanto a la participación de las empresas en el cuestionario CDP, como al nivel de transparencia. Este estudio proporciona nuevos conocimientos sobre cómo las empresas utilizan la divulgación voluntaria de carbono para adaptarse a las expectativas sociales generadas por la regulación obligatoria de cambio climático en su contexto institucional.