Ownership structure and climate-related corporate reporting

Abstract

We investigate the impacts of various types of corporate ownership structures (i.e.institutional, government, and managerial ownership) on climate-related corporate reporting as reflected in the levels of voluntary carbon disclosure.Using a sample of S&P 500 companies from 2015 to 2020 across both environmentally sensitive and non-environmentally sensitive industries, we find that diverse ownership structures have distinct impacts and preferences in corporate carbon disclosure.Specifically, government ownership is likely to promote transparency of carbon information.In contrast, the ownership held by institutional investors (total, short-term, and long-term), managers (i.e.CEOs, directors), and block-holders are negatively associated with the proactive greenhouse gas disclosure.We also find evidence that climate governance quality plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between two ownership types (i.e.long-term institutional investors and blockholder) and a firm's climate-related corporate reporting.Our findings offer some practical insights for managers, regulators, and policymakers to focus on the configuration of corporate ownership in the context of improving green practices.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.