Environmental Accounting Practice and Firm Value of Quoted Oil and Gas Companies in Nigeria

Abstract

The firm value of companies is essentially one of the measures of the effectiveness and managerial competence of the managers optimizing corporate resources. Evidence from research in recent times shows that meeting firm value expectations of shareholders has become a complex task considering Nigeria's infrastructural deficits and economic instability challenges prevalent in the country. Studies have shown that companies' sensitivity to environmental accounting practices tends to create good legitimacy, reputation and corporate brand capable of ensuring effective corporate performance and improved firm value. This study examined the impact of environmental accounting practices on the stock value of Nigerian oil and gas businesses. The Global Reporting Initiative checklist and secondary data from the corporations' annual financial reports were utilized in an expo facto research design. A total of 12 firms were selected using a purposive sampling technique from a population of 18 oil and gas firms quoted in Nigeria. The certification by the statutory auditors served as the foundation for the data's reliability and validity. Inferential statistics (multiple regression using panel data) was used to analyze the data. The study found that environmental accounting practices had a significant effect on the firm value of quoted oil and gas companies in Nigeria (Adj.R 2 = 0.0925; Wald test (3, 176) = 34.98; p < 0.05). Consequently, this study concluded that environmental accounting practice had a significant effect on the firm value of quoted oil and gas companies in Nigeria.The study recommended that managers should constantly prioritize sound environmental accounting practices in order to raise the expectations of the stakeholders and improve firm value.

Corporate Sustainability and Shareholders’ Wealth in the National Financial Sector

“…The study also discovered that environmental disclosure significantly improved market share price and Tobin's Q, a performance indicator. On the other hand, unfavourable impacts were noted by [33,42,25,54].…”

“…Shareholders' Wealth: Shareholders' wealth is a reflection of returns and rewards periodically distributed to the shareholders in the form of dividends paid and other proceeds from the sales of stock. Ordinarily, shareholders' wealth could be measured by the market value as the actual price of the companies' stock trades in the capital market of the companies' common stock [23,52,54]. The overall objective of the public corporation has been to maximize shareholders' wealth.…”

“…However, they might become more closely involved in the company, and try to influence the decision of the directors, when they feel that their interests are threatened. For instance, shareholders might think that wealth maximisation is under threat when there are visible falling profits and falling stock prices, lower dividend payments and unfavourable dividend policy of the organization, a proposal to invest in a major project where the business risk is high and proposal takeover bid for another company or from another company [54,50,47,48].…”