Foreign Institutional Investors, Legal Origin, and Corporate Greenhouse Gas Emissions Disclosure

Simon Döring, Wolfgang Drobetz, Sadok El Ghoul, Omrane Guedhami () and Henning Schröder
Additional contact information
Simon Döring: University of Hamburg
Omrane Guedhami: University of South Carolina
Henning Schröder: Leuphana University Lüneburg

Journal of Business Ethics, 2023, vol. 182, issue 4, No 2, 903-932

Abstract: Abstract The disclosure of corporate environmental performance is an increasingly important element of a firm’s ethical behavior. We analyze how the legal origin of foreign institutional investors affects a firm’s voluntary greenhouse gas emissions disclosure. Using a large sample of firms from 36 countries, we show that foreign institutional ownership from civil law countries improves the scope and quality of a firm’s greenhouse gas emissions reporting. This relation is robust to addressing endogeneity and selection biases. The effect is more pronounced in firms from non-climate-sensitized countries, for which the gap between firms’ environmental standards and investors’ environmental targets is potentially larger, and in less international firms. Firms with a higher level of voluntary greenhouse gas emissions disclosure also exhibit higher valuations.

Keywords: Institutional investors; Foreign ownership; Legal origin; Corporate environmental responsibility; Greenhouse gas emissions disclosure; Firm value (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-022-05289-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jbuset:v:182:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s10551-022-05289-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-022-05289-6

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().