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This study aims to examine the moderating effect of cultural conditions on the relationship between environmental performance and environmental disclosure.

The authors used meta-analysis technique to examine 100 effect sizes from 43 studies published between 1982 and 2023 to integrate the existing results and to detect causes contributing to variability of results across studies.

There is a significant positive relationship between environmental performance and environmental disclosure. Further, the authors found that cultures with long-term orientation positively moderated the relationship, whereas cultures with high uncertainty avoidance and indulgence negatively moderated it.

This study did not account for the problem of endogeneity between environmental performance and environmental disclosure because most of the already published studies included in the authors’ meta-analysis did not address this issue.

This research provides regulators and policymakers insights on the influence of cultural factors on environmental disclosure and performance, critical information to consider when adopting, or revising social and environmental policy and regulations within a country.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first meta-analysis study examining different cultural dimensions influencing the relationship between environmental performance and environmental disclosure and contributes new knowledge to the literature on determinants of environmental disclosure.

This paper examines how firms respond to local government’s environment initiatives through textual analysis of government work reports (GWRs). This study aims to provide insights into how firms strategically respond to government’s environmental initiatives through their disclosure and investment practices.

This study uses a textual analysis of GWRs from China’s provinces. The frequency and change rate of environmental keywords in these reports are used as a measure of the government’s environmental initiatives.

This study finds that environmental disclosure scores in environmental, social and governance (ESG) reports increase with the frequency or change rate of environmental keywords in provincial GWRs. This effect is more pronounced for non-state-owned enterprises, firms in highly marketized provinces or those listed in a single capital market. However, there is no significant relationship between firms’ environmental investments and government initiatives, except for cross-listed firms in provinces with consistently high frequency of environmental keywords in their GWRs.

The findings indicate that government environmental initiatives can shape firms’ disclosure behaviors, yet have limited influence on investment decisions, suggesting that environmental disclosure could potentially be opportunistic. This underscores the need for more effective strategies to stimulate firms’ environmental investments.

This study provides valuable insights into the differential impacts of government environmental initiatives on firms’ disclosure and investment behaviors, contributing to the understanding of corporate environmental responsibility in the context of government initiatives.

This study aims to evaluate the adequacy of climate risk disclosure by providing empirical evidence on whether corporate disclosure meets rising stakeholders’ demand for risk disclosure concerning climate change.

Drawing on a triangulated approach for collecting data from multiple sources in a longitudinal study, we perform a panel regression analysis on a sample of multinational firms between 2007 and 2021. Inspired by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) principles, our innovative and inclusive model of measuring firm-level climate risks underscores the urgent need to redefine materiality from a broader value creation (rather than only financial) perspective, including the impact on sustainable development.

The findings of this study provide evidence of limited corporate climate risk disclosure, indicating that organisations have yet to accept the reality of climate-related risks. An additional finding supports the existence of a nexus between higher corporate environmental disclosure and higher corporate resilience to material financial and environmental risks, rather than pervasive sustainability risk disclosure.

We argue that a mechanical process for climate-related risk disclosure can limit related disclosure variability, risk reporting priority selection, thereby broadening the short-term perspective on financial materiality assessment for disclosure.

This study extends recent literature on the adequacy of corporate risk disclosure, highlighting the importance of disclosing material sustainability risks from the perspectives of different stakeholder groups for long-term success. Corporate management should place climate-related risks at the centre of their disclosure strategies. We argue that reducing the systematic underestimation of climate-related risks and variations in their disclosure practices may require regulations that enhance corporate perceptions and responses to these risks.

This study emphasises the importance of reconceptualising materiality from a multidimensional value creation standpoint, encapsulating financial and sustainable development considerations. This novel model of assessing firm-level climate risk, based on the GRI principles, underscores the necessity of developing a more comprehensive approach to evaluating materiality.

Albeit gradual and uneven, the emergence of social and environmental reporting by publicly held corporations has been a major development in the last few decades. This paper aims to explore patterns of the emergence of these disclosures. Using an institutional theory lens, this paper considers mimetic, normative and coercive possibilities.

US publicly traded company data from 2013 to 2019 is used to test the hypotheses. Mimetic forces are proxied with corporate board interlock frequency. Normative ones use the extent of gender diversity on corporate boards. Measures of business climate and industry regulatory sensitivity proxy coercive potentiality.

Studied in isolation, each of the three forces through which organizations pursue the heightened legitimacy of enhanced environmental and social disclosures has credibility. The strongest support exists for mimetic and normative mechanisms, perhaps because the US government has been reluctant to make these expanded disclosures mandatory.

In the world of voluntary action, more attention to diffusion is needed. For these purposes, better proxies will be needed to study change. Social and environmental information should be separated for individual analysis.

At least in the USA, companies are attentive to what other companies are doing. There is something to be said for the ethical dimension of corporate transparency.

Governmental action in this area has not been effective, at current levels. Corporate leadership is essential. Critical information is shared about disclosure by board members.

Although institutional theory makes several appearances in this area, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current study is the first empirical archival study to examine the three forces simultaneously, providing evidence as to the relative magnitude of each institutional force on environmental and social disclosures. Should these disclosures not be mandated by government, this study shows pathways for enhanced disclosures to continue to spread.

The study aims to identify and discuss influential aspects of corporate environmental disclosure (CED) literature, including key streams, themes, authors, keywords, journals, affiliations and countries. This review also constructs agendas for future CED research.

Using a bibliometric review approach, the authors reviewed 560 articles on CED from 215 journals published between 1982 and 2020.

The authors' insights are three-fold. First, the authors identified three core streams of CED research: “legitimization of environmental hazards via environmental disclosures,” “the role of environmental accounting in achieving corporate environmental sustainability” and “integrating environmental social and governance (ESG) reporting into the global reporting initiatives (GRI) guidelines”. Second, the authors also deployed a thematic map that classifies CED research into four themes: niche themes (e.g. institutional theory and environmental management system), motor themes (e.g. stakeholder engagement), emerging/declining themes (e.g. legitimacy theory) and basic/transversal themes (e.g. voluntary CED, environmental reporting and corporate social responsibility). Third, the authors highlighted important CED authors, keywords, journals, articles, affiliations and countries.

This study assists researchers, journal editors and consultants in the corporate sector to comprehensively understand various dimensions of CED research and practices and suggests potential emerging research areas. Although this paper appears to have been thoroughly conducted, using authors' keywords to identify themes was a key limitation. Thus, the authors call upon using a more comprehensive data mining technique that uses keywords in abstracts, titles and the whole body of papers and then identifies inclusive trends in CED literature.

The authors contribute to the extant accounting literature by investigating the organizational-level CED, both mandatory and voluntary, using a systematic and bibliometric literature review model to summarize the key research streams, themes, authors, journals, affiliations and countries. By doing so, the authors construct a future research agenda for CED literature.

This study aims to investigate the association between corporate tax avoidance and environmental costs and disclosure in Indonesia and Australia for the research period 2015–2019. This study also analyzes corporate strategies for overcoming public concerns about tax avoidance activities, namely, the trade-off legitimacy and risk reduction strategies, through two mechanisms: the mediation and moderation roles of environmental disclosure on the relationship between environmental costs and tax avoidance activities.

The data consists of 675 and 235 observations for Australia and Indonesia, respectively, which were analyzed quantitatively using panel regression.

The results showed that the trade-off legitimacy or risk reduction strategies are not found to be implemented by companies in Indonesia, while in Australia, corporations use the trade-off legitimacy strategy to reduce risk and overcome the negative impact of tax avoidance activities. The results also provide empirical evidence on the impact of environmental costs on environmental disclosure in both countries.

This study contributes to the literature by providing the latest evidence on the role of environmental costs on environmental disclosure, which has rarely been investigated in previous studies.

This study investigates whether carbon media legitimacy is influenced by carbon performance and/or carbon disclosure using a direct measure of carbon media legitimacy in UK context.

To test this study's hypotheses, the authors employ Tobit regression analysis of 95 UK companies listed in FTSE350. The authors use balanced panel data (475 observations in total) to reduces the noise introduced by unit heterogeneity.

The authors find that while corporate carbon performance is not reflected in carbon media legitimacy, carbon media legitimacy is positively and significantly affected by voluntary carbon disclosure (irrespective of its quality). Thus, voluntary carbon disclosure is shown to be an effective tool in legitimising corporate activities.

The results show a certain degree of naivety on the part of the media in assessing corporate carbon behaviour, since it values carbon disclosure (irrespective of its quality) more than carbon performance. Such media behaviour may hinder future improvement in carbon performance of firms.

This study's results indicate that the existing UK carbon disclosure policy does not address the heart of climate change and global warming. Thus, tougher regulations should be considered by policy-makers in relation to voluntary carbon disclosure in the UK.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine whether carbon media legitimacy is associated with both carbon performance and carbon disclosure using a direct measure of carbon media legitimacy, and to use the UK context when addressing this association. It also examines the effectiveness of quality of carbon disclosure as legitimation tool.

This paper aims to examine the association between environmental disclosure and waste performance.

This study is based on a sample of S&P 500 firms over a nine-year period from 2010 to 2018. The pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), logistic, propensity score matching (PSM) and instrumental variable-generalized method of moments regressions analyses have been used to examine the data.

The findings show a significant positive relationship between waste performance and environmental disclosure, suggesting that firms with superior waste performance tend to disclose more environmental information. Further, the authors distinguish between “hard” and “soft” environmental disclosures and find that the effect of waste performance is consistently positive and significant for each type. The observed positive and significant association of waste performance with environmental disclosure remains unchanged, regardless of the industry affiliation of firms, although firms from industries that are less environmentally sensitive provide a slightly higher level of environmental disclosure. The authors also explore possible channels that may explain the association between waste performance and environmental disclosure and find that litigation risk and cash holdings positively moderate the association. The finding remains robust to a number of alternative estimation approaches.

Overall, the authors present important evidence that waste performance is an important indicator of environmental disclosure. The findings are useful for corporations and stakeholders and have important implications around the globe as the authors continue to grapple with the ongoing issue of waste.

This study aims to examine the impact of directors’ green experience on the disclosure of environmental information by firms. Furthermore, it investigates the mediating role of firm green culture and the moderating effect of Confucianism in this mediation process.

The selected sample for this study comprises the A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2020. The data on “directors’ green experiences,” “Confucianism” and “green culture” were manually collected and organized, while other data were obtained from China Stock Market & Accounting Research Database. After eliminating corporations with ST, *ST and missing data, a total of 29,419 samples were obtained. The hypotheses were tested using a multiple linear regression model, and statistical analysis was performed using Stata 16.0.

The findings of this study reveal that directors’ green experience positively influences firm environmental information disclosure, and firm green culture mediates this relationship. Moreover, Confucianism moderates the impact of directors’ green experience on firm environmental information disclosure, as well as the mediating role of green culture in the relationship between directors’ green experience and firm environmental information disclosure.

The disclosure of environmental information plays a significant role in promoting a firm’s environmental performance as well as its competitive advantage. While previous studies examine various factors leading to firms’ environmental information disclosure, the influence of managerial characteristics on firm environmental information disclosure has not received adequate research attention. The present study investigates the effect of directors’ green experience on environmental information disclosure, contributing to the existing literature on firms’ environmental information disclosure and managerial features. Meanwhile, it enriches the literature on firm governance and imprinting theory.

Businesses are now under more pressure from society, legislatures, and other stakeholders to act responsibly since there is a deeper understanding of how businesses affect society globally. Whether a company environmental policy is actively pursued or passively approved, boards are ultimately in charge of it. Hence, the aim of the study is to investigate the influence of the board of directors’ characteristics, namely board size, meetings, independence, gender diversity, and qualification, on environmental disclosure. The study covers all listed manufacturing companies in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain for the years 2018–2022. The study expects that the board of directors’ characteristics should have a significant impact on enhancing the environmental disclosure. The finding of the study will add a vital contribution to the literature as it is the first study to be conducted in a developing country, such as Bahrain, where no study has yet been conducted there. The finding will help different parties, for example, policy makers, regulators, and shareholders as well as managers on the effect of the board of directors on the level of high quality in environmental disclosure that will build a good reputation for companies.