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In recent years, firms tend to direct their attention in communicating their environmental actions with their stakeholders. However, the level of environmental disclosers varies significantly among firms. This paper aims to explain the variation in environmental disclosure of firms based on their ownership type, namely – state ownership and institutional ownership. The study further aims to understand whether and how the relationship between ownership structure and environmental disclosure changes regarding countries’ development levels.

This paper uses a sample of 27,847 firm-year observations from 72 countries/economic districts between the years 2002 and 2017 and regression analysis to test how the relationship between different ownership structures and environmental disclosure and whether this relation is conditional on countries’ development levels.

This study finds that firms with higher state ownership have higher environmental disclosures and higher institutional ownership has a negative effect on environmental disclosures. Furthermore, this paper also documents that firms with higher state ownership and operating in developed countries have incrementally higher environmental disclosure, relative to firms operating in developing countries.

The study has limitations that would provide possible starting points for further research. The first limitation is related to the environmental disclosure measure, which reflects the level of environmental disclosure of firms based on their disclosure information given in the Thomson Reuters, Asset4 database. A more refined measure can be constructed using hand-collected data based on linguistic analysis, which may reflect not only the level of the disclosure but also the quality of the environmental disclosure. The second limitation is the limited focus of the study toward state and institutional shareholding. Therefore, future research may consider examining the different types of ownership such as family ownership.

The findings of the study may help policymakers and regulators to consider the potential impact of various ownership types on environmental disclosures. Also, given the impact of countries’ development levels, regulators should consider that a one-size-fits-all is not applicable in environmental disclosures. Therefore, each country should consider the institutional dynamics of their operating environment to set appropriate regulations to enhance environmental disclosures.

From a social perspective, the findings indicate that firms’ stakeholder engagement via environmental disclosures depends on the type of the controlling shareholders.

This study contributes to the literature by developing a new construct for environmental disclosure based on Biodiversity, Climate Change, Environmental Investments and Spill Impact Reduction performance measures. Further, grounding on legitimacy and stakeholder theories, this study shows the influence of ownership type on environmental disclosures and how this effect changes in accordance with the countries’ development.

This study is designed and directed to analyze the effect of board characteristics and audit committee attributes on the firm performance of publicly listed commercial banks of Bangladesh.

Thirty publicly listed commercial banks of Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE) have been taken as sample for this study. Data have been collected from annual reports between 2011 and 2017 of the assessed banks. Pooled OLS model has been used for running regression model of this study.

Board independence has a negative and significant relationship with ROA and Tobin's Q. However, Board Independence has a positive and significant relationship with Stock Return. On the other hand, Board Diversity has a negative and significant relationship with ROA and ROE, which implies inefficiency of diversified board members in the context of Bangladesh. Family duality has a positive and significant relationship with ROA and a negative and significant relationship with Stock return. Board Meeting has a positive and significant relationship with ROA. Audit Committee Size has a negative and significant relationship with Tobins' Q. Independence of audit committee chairman has a negative and significant relationship with Tobin's Q and Stock Returns. Presence of non-executive directors and number of audit meetings have no significant relationship with any of the predicted variables.

Among all variables of the board characteristics, role of independent directors and participation of female directors have conflicting results in this study. This has raised a question about the fair appointment independent directors and their objective view on the board. Female directors' role is not convincing in the context of Bangladesh as most of the commercial banks are family-owned. Policymakers can tighten and supervise the appointment of independent directors to ensure good governance in the banking sector. Moreover, role of audit committee and independence of audit committee chairman have generated conflicting results in terms of market-based performance measure.

Banking sector of Bangladesh experiences huge corruption in the form of excessive NPLs and poor management quality which results in low profit for the firm. This study has explored the problems of management quality and flaws of audit committee which is hampering overall growth of banking industry. Improvement of independent directors' appointment and audit committee formation and reporting will certainly help banking industry of Bangladesh to improve overall performance.

Public sector auditing research has changed rapidly over the past four decades. This paper aims to reveal how the field has developed and identify avenues for future research.

The authors used a structured literature review following Massaro et al. The sample comprises papers on public sector auditing published in accounting and public sector management journals between 1991 and 2020.

The present analysis highlights that academic research interest in public sector auditing has grown and become more diverse. The authors argue this may reflect a transformation of the public sector in recent decades, owing to the developing institutional logics of public sector reforms, from traditional public administration to new public management and now new public governance.

This paper offers a comprehensive review of the public sector auditing literature, discussing different perspectives over time. It also outlines the various public sector reforms introduced over the period of the study. In reviewing the existing literature, the authors highlight the themes for future research and policy settings.

This study aims to address how the ISO 14001 standardisation and certification process improves substantive performance in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the development of an environmental management control system (EMCS).

A qualitative cross-case interview design with those responsible for the implementation of an environmental management system (certified to ISO 14001) in SMEs is adopted to inductively “theorise” the EMCS.

The design and monitoring of environmental controls are often beyond the scope of the SMEs’ top management team and include extra-organisational dimensions such as the external audit and institutional requirements. This suggests more complex control pathways for SMEs to produce EMCS that primarily function as packages and are broader than the analytical level of the firm. Here, controlling for environmental performance exists at strategic and operational levels, as well as beyond the SMEs’ boundaries.

Various internal controls are put forward for SME owner-managers to meet environmental targets (e.g. gamification and interpersonal communication strategies). This builds upon a broader accountability perspective wherein formalised hierarchical control is only one route for ensuring sustainable action within the ISO 14001-certified SMEs.

This study contributes to a more sustainable society through developing an understanding of how environmental sustainability is substantively managed by SMEs to improve performance for current and future generations.

This paper, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is one of the first to establish how SMEs control for environmental sustainability from empirically derived evidence. In doing so, it provides an example of the EMCS for the SME context.