The objectivity of corporate environmental reporting: a study of Finnish listed firms' environmental disclosures

Abstract

This study examines the objectivity of Finnish listed companies' environmental reporting in their ordinary annual reports during the period 1985–1996. We study the firms' practice to disclose negative versus positive environmental events that are ex ante publicly known. As regards the entire research period, the results show that the environmental reporting of the sample firms cannot be considered objective, since the proportional share of negative events reported was negligible compared to the respective percentage for positive events. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Web content mining for comparing corporate and third‐party online reporting: a case study on solid waste management

“…Niskanen et al, 2001). The results indicate that companies view waste management activities overwhelmingly positively, yielding positive results in all nine categories and the highest scores in eight of them.…”

“…The prevalence of corporate environmental disclosures in different industries or countries has been examined in both snapshot and longitudinal analyses, including studies on Australia Gordon, 1996), Finland (Niskanan andNeiminen, 2001), France (Cormier and Magnan, 2003), the United Kingdom (Campbell, 2003), Europe, Japan and the US (Kolk, 2005). Frequently, an industry's environmental impact positively correlates with its degree of environmental disclosure (Deegan and Rankin, 1996;Kolk et al, 2001;Gray et al, 2001;.…”

“…Esrock and Leichty's (1998; content analyses of sustainability reporting on corporate websites have highlighted the growing proportion of companies engaging in web-mediated environmental communication. Also, a number of studies have revealed that the content of corporate environmental communication is almost exclusively positive and self-laudatory, while the amount of negative information is negligible (Wiseman, 1982;Rockness, 1985;Deegan and Gordon, 1996;Deegan and Rankin, 1996;Niskanen and Neiminen, 2001). …”

Sustainable Supply Chain Based on News Articles and Sustainability Reports: Text Mining with Leximancer and DICTION

“…The rationale behind analyzing news before other data types is that news is generated from topics on social, corporate, government, and national issues in which the public may be interested [120]. Furthermore, it is generated by a third party, which means it is more likely to be objective than reports compiled by a firm [121,122].…”

The consideration of environmental matters in the audit of financial reports

“…After studying the annual reports of Finnish companies published between 1985 and 1996, Niskanen and Neiminen (2001) concluded that:…”