Stakeholder Relevance for Reporting

Abstract

Although stakeholder theory is widely accepted in environmental disclosure research, empirical evidence about the role of stakeholders in firms’ disclosure is still scarce. The authors address this issue for a setting of carbon disclosure. Our international sample comprises the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 350 reports from 2008 to 2011, resulting in a total of 1,120 firms with 3,631 firm-year observations. The authors apply Tobit regressions to analyze the relationship between carbon disclosure and the relevance of the following stakeholder groups: government, general public, media, employees, and customers. Our results confirm that in addition to carbon performance, all stakeholders are associated with carbon disclosure. Only one stakeholder group (government) acts as a moderator for the relationship between carbon performance and carbon disclosure. Furthermore, the authors find that carbon performance but not the affiliation to a carbon-intensive industry acts as a moderator between stakeholder relevance and carbon disclosure.

Corporations at a crossroads: How multilevel governance interactions shape participation and effort in private governance regimes

“…These contemporaneous time-varying variables are lagged by 1 year in the analysis to mitigate the possibility of reverse causation in the sense that larger, more deep-pocketed firms may be financially better positioned to cope with the costs of meeting the CDP's requirements (including but not limited to disclosure requirements), and therefore more likely to self-select into the CDP. This is in line with scholarship that shows larger firms are more likely to participate in voluntary environmental programs (Arora & Cason, 1996;DeCanio & Watkins, 1998;Henriques & Sadorsky, 1996;Khanna et al, 2007;Stanny & Ely, 2008;Videras & Alberini, 2000), in order to mitigate the potential negative impacts of a tarnished public image due to an increased susceptibility to public scrutiny (Aerts, Cormier, & Magnan, 2008;Guenther, Guenther, Schiemann, & Weber, 2015;Luo, Lan, & Tang, 2012).…”

The relevance of national contexts for carbon disclosure decisions of stock-listed companies: a multilevel analysis

“…Furthermore, qualitative studies on the use of disclosed carbon information have shown that some investors do indeed collect carbon information, but then do not use it in their everyday investment decision making (Haigh, 2013;Pfeifer and Sullivan, 2008). Second, while a 'shareholder'-oriented governance might incentivize disclosure, a similar effect might be produced by 'stakeholder'-oriented governance which is more widespread in European civil-law countries, and empirical results show that stakeholders also influence carbon disclosure (Guenther et al, 2016). Thus, we have a theoretical deadlock between signaling and stakeholder theory.…”

Determinants of Voluntary Greenhouse Gas Emission Disclosure: An Empirical Investigation on Turkish Firms

“…Companies have been facing an increasing pressure to asses, reduce and report their GHG emissions from different types of stakeholders, such as consumers, governments, suppliers, investors, financial institutions, media, non-governmental organizations and the general public as corporate activities have a significant effect on the global GHG emissions, directly or indirectly [7,11,[22][23][24][25]. In order to respond to these pressures, a growing number of companies around the world have started to establish strategies and take actions to mitigate their carbon footprint and disclose information about GHG emissions by using various channels of communication [11,26,27].…”