Learning to be green: Accounting comparability and environmental violations

Justin Chircop, Monika Tarsalewska and Agnieszka Trzeciakiewicz

The British Accounting Review, 2025, vol. 57, issue 5

Abstract: Over recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the costs to the environment of corporate actions. We posit that accounting comparability between a firm and its peers, facilitates firm learning of the impact peer firm activities have on the environment. This learning allows the firm to reduce its own environmental violations. In line with this conjecture, our findings show that accounting comparability is negatively associated with environmental violations. Further, the reduction in firm environmental violations is larger in the presence of comparable peer firms disclosing low toxic releases, suggesting that firms are better able to learn from peer firms with low environmental impact. Our results provide novel evidence that accounting comparability facilitates green learning and therefore benefits society at large by reducing environmental harm.

Keywords: Accounting comparability; Environmental violations; Toxic emissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G30 G32 G34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0890838923000872
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bracre:v:57:y:2025:i:5:s0890838923000872

DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2023.101240

Access Statistics for this article

The British Accounting Review is currently edited by Nathan Lael Joseph and Alan Lowe

More articles in The British Accounting Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().