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To determine whether to entrust the European Union (EU) to create a new nonfinancial reporting framework or endorse the extant reporting framework developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), this study aims to explore whether the mandatory implementation of the EU Directive positively impacted the GRI-based environmental disclosure.

The authors compared the pre- and post-EU Directive environmental disclosure of 16 Italian environmentally sensitive companies. The authors used an extended coding scheme and developed a unique scoring system to compare the quantitative and qualitative changes in environmental disclosure.

The analysis showed that the quantity of environmental disclosure increased after the mandatory EU Directive adoption. The most significant change was observed regarding the disclosure topics explicitly required by the Italian legislature. Additionally, disclosure of soft information continued to prevail over that of hard information in the post-Directive period. While the Directive boosted the level of adherence to GRI standards, Italian companies disclosed information that could be easily mimicked (soft) instead of objective measures that could be verified (hard). In light of this evidence, the endorsement of extant GRI standards could be a valuable option for enhancing the comparability and transparency of environmental disclosure.

This study used an original extended coding system and proposed related environmental disclosure indexes that allow monitoring changes in environmental disclosure over time. To the authors’ best knowledge, this study is one of the few that justifies the significant impact of regulation (here the EU Directive) on the increase in environmental disclosure and that uses hard and soft information typology to examine the quality of environmental disclosure.

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.

Although studies in corporate sustainability have been vastly growing, there has been an increasing demand for more industry-specific sustainability reporting studies to develop a greater understanding of industry differences in sustainability reporting practice. This study aims to measure the quality of sustainability disclosures in the current leading environmentally sensitive industry in Australia – the resources industry.

A scoring index was developed to measure economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainability by integrating the fundamental principles of the hard and soft disclosure items from Clarkson et al.’s (2008) environmental index into the social and economic aspects of the Global Reporting Initiative framework. Subsequently, the index was used to assess sustainability disclosures in the annual and sustainability reports of resources companies in Australia.

The main findings show that companies report more of soft disclosure items than the hard ones. It is also found that companies report most sustainability information in the economic aspect rather than the social and the environmental aspects of sustainability. Most companies disclose sustainability information in their annual reports with few companies producing stand-alone sustainability reports.

This study addresses the need for more industry-specific sustainability studies by focusing on Australia’s resources industry. It also contributes to the lack of an existing tool to measure disclosures based on companies’ true contributions to sustainability by developing a new scoring index for hard and soft sustainability disclosures, which includes all three aspects of sustainability (i.e. economic, environmental and social).

The objective of the present study is to examine the extent, quality, nature and trends of environmental disclosures of Malaysian property development companies for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006.

A content analysis was undertaken of the annual reports of a sample of public listed property development companies in Malaysia for the years 2004, 2005 and 2006. The content analysis examined extent, nature and quality of disclosures, utilising number of sentences for extent and the Clarkson et al. disclosure index for nature and quality.

Malaysian property development companies do not appear to respond to the increased public concern due to recent landslide incidents by increasing the extent or quality of environmental disclosures in their annual reports. Both extent and quality of environmental disclosures are very low and most companies provide mostly “soft” disclosures. They also make very few “hard” disclosures, comprising objective, verifiable data. Thus, the Malaysian Government needs to seriously consider making environmental reporting mandatory and to provide more detailed and comprehensive environmental reporting guidelines. Another major finding is that companies are not consistent in the extent, nature or quality of environmental disclosures made over time.

The paper provides empirical evidence of the extent, quality and nature of environmental disclosures in an environmentally‐sensitive sector. It is the first study in a developing country to utilise the Clarkson et al. index, which was developed based on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines.

This study aims to empirically examine the influence of CEO characteristics on the sustainability performance of listed banks in Bangladesh through the lens of upper echelons theory.

The authors estimated sustainability performance score based on a hand collected data set from the annual report and sustainability reports of the Bangladeshi listed banks. Following Clarkson et al. (2008), the sustainability index developed by Ong et al. (2016) and the G4 sustainability reporting standards of the global reporting initiative (GRI), a unique scoring index was developed to gather and assess sustainability data from listed banks. A panel regression analysis model is used to investigate the impact of CEO attributes on sustainability performance.

The findings of this study reveal that higher academic qualifications, greater industry experience and a longer tenure of the CEO have a significant and positive impact on the sustainable performance of the Bangladeshi listed banks. Furthermore, this study reveals that Bangladeshi listed banks are considerably behind in implementing the sustainability recommendations of Bangladesh Bank.

This study provides new evidence of how CEOs’ attributes can affect the sustainability reporting of Bangladeshi listed banks. Furthermore, this study measures the real contribution towards sustainability performance compared with the general claims about sustainability made by listed banks in Bangladesh.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the environmental disclosure practices of firms engaged in environmentally sensitive industries by examining their association with environmental performance.

The study tests for associations between environmental performance and the level and nature of environmental disclosures by listed Chinese firms operating in industries that have been identified by a regulator as environmentally sensitive. The level of environmental disclosure is measured using a disclosure index based on the global reporting initiative. The nature of environmental disclosure is measured as the ratio of hard to total disclosure items.

Firms with more favourable environmental performance provide a higher level of environmental disclosure and include a greater proportion of hard disclosure items. However, the overall level of disclosure is lower than that observed in developed countries.

Due to data constraints, the proxy for environmental performance is based on the receipt and maintenance of environmental titles and awards and does not capture variation in the level of environmental performance of firms with no titles or awards.

As China continues to embrace market-based economic reform, the ability to reflect sustainable choices through market transactions is of increasing importance to the preservation of economic, natural and social capital for future generations.

The study examines the relation between environmental reporting and environmental performance by firms operating in industries that have been identified by a regulator as environmentally sensitive.

This study aims to investigate the role of regional environmental transparency on corporate environmental disclosure.

This study uses the introduction of a nationwide automated air pollution monitoring network in China as a quasi-natural experiment and employs regression analysis. Robustness checks, including parallel trend test and placebo test, are performed to test the robustness of the results.

Sharing air pollution data with the public can improve corporate environmental disclosure. Firms with poorer environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance prefer to disclose less informative information after the automated network is implemented compared with firms with better ESG performance. The relationship between information sharing and corporate environmental transparency is more pronounced when local air pollution is severer, firms face stronger investor scrutiny and firms are from heavily polluting industries. The mechanism tests suggest the automated system can draw public environmental attention and improve governments’ aspiration for environmental governance. Finally, corporate environmental disclosure can reduce stock price crash risk and cost of equity.

Real-time pollution data reporting is an important solution to raising public environmental awareness and then enhancing the effectiveness of pollution control.

This study has implications for policy-making regarding environmental governance and environmental disclosure.

This study confirms that pollution information transparency can motivate firms to increase environmental disclosure.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between environmental performance of firms and the level of voluntary environmental disclosure in emerging markets.

We used tobit regression OLS and t-test methods to reveal the association between environmental performance and the level of voluntary environmental disclosure.

We find a significant positive association between the level of discretionary environmental disclosures and corporate environmental performance. The result is in line with the arguments of economics disclosure theory that argues environmentally good performers disclose more.

Many of the environmentally good firms in Turkey are also listed in the “BIST Sustainability Index,” and this situation can be the result of the relative power of external regulations. Accordingly, it can be suggested to increase the community and governmental pressures for environmental reporting but also gives importance to increase intrinsic motivations for companies to engage in disclosure practices.

This study shed light on relation between environmental performance and environmental disclosure in an emerging market context. Also, it is revisited that the relation between environmental performance and the level of environmental disclosure by testing two different predictions on the level of environmental disclosures.

This study aims to evaluate the impact of corporate governance on sustainability reporting by investigating companies operating in the Australian resources industry.

This study investigates the relationships between the total sustainability disclosures and, separately, the three aspects of sustainability disclosures – economic, environmental and social – and corporate governance mechanisms proxy by various attributes of board composition. The sustainability disclosures were scored using Ong et al.’s (2016) index.

Significant positive correlations were found between the extent of sustainability disclosures and the proportion of independent directors, multiple directorships and female directors on the board.

Unlike traditional content analysis methods, this study adopts a newly developed Global Reporting Initiatives-based reporting index that identifies companies with good sustainability performance by aligning companies’ disclosures to their sustainability performance.

This paper aims to assess the disclosure on materiality analysis in sustainability and integrated reports through the lenses of legitimacy and stakeholder theory. The following three research questions are addressed: to what extent do companies report on their materiality analysis, what are the methods used for the analysis of the stakeholders and their topics/aspects and is there a higher disclosure of information of materiality assessment because of G4.

The paper uses an archival research approach and deploys content analysis. Thus, a binary disclosure index was developed that indicates whether materiality related information are mentioned and explained in detail. The sample contains 132 reports from 33 companies of the German 110 HDAX stock market index between 2014 and 2017.

The paper reveals that materiality analysis is a growing phenomenon. Nevertheless, companies disclose only a small amount of related information and fail to explain the methods for the stakeholder and topics/aspects identification. Thus, the underlying processes to define the report content remains unclear. Through the lenses of legitimacy theory, the study indicates that materiality analysis can strategically be misused to define report content without considering the interests of legitimized stakeholder groups and thus, does not improve the reports to those groups.

Managers are urged to regard the importance of reporting about ongoing materiality assessments, as otherwise, concerns about the overall reliability of the information presented may arise.

Poor reporting about materiality assessments might lead to potential conflicts with stakeholders that do see their important topics not sufficiently reflected in the sustainability or integrated report.

This study contributes to the literature regarding materiality in sustainability and integrated reporting and uses the assumptions of disclosure theories to evaluate the disclosure of a specific disclosure item.