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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the crude oil volatility index (OVX) plays any key role in explaining the trend in emerging market stock returns from a global standpoint.

At the empirical stage, different forms of the GARCH-jump model have been estimated.

The findings confirm the effects of OVX on equity returns. In addition, the results document that there exist time-varying jumps in the stock market returns. Besides, the impacts of OVX shocks appear to be symmetric. The analysis further shows that the magnitude of OVX impact is marginally bigger than that of the conventional oil price shocks.

Since various financial assets are traded on the basis of oil and equity markets, investors, for instance, could use the findings of this study for taking proper investment decisions and gaining better portfolio diversification benefits. Additionally, policymakers could utilize the results to develop effective measures and strategies in order to minimize the oil price risk.

This study aims to examine whether there exists any relationship between corporate biodiversity reporting decision (CBRD) and corporate environmental performance (CEP).

The primary sample contains 442 firm-year observations over a period of 13 years (2008–2020) for 34 listed Finnish companies. Based on both legitimacy theory and voluntary disclosure theory, 2 logit regression models are estimated to test the CBRD–CEP nexus. CBRD is a dichotomous variable. Three proxies for CEP, namely propensity to emit greenhouse gas (GHG), propensity to consume water and propensity to generate waste are employed.

This study finds that firms having higher propensity to consume water and generate waste are inclined to release biodiversity-related information. The findings support legitimacy theory suggesting that firms with inferior environmental performance may decide on reporting biodiversity information for legitimation purpose.

The study uses Finnish data and hence, the results may lack in generalizability to other national contexts.

The results of this study should be valuable to policy makers for formulating mandatory biodiversity reporting standards to ensure disclosure of standard, extensive and authentic biodiversity-related information by companies. The results should also be valuable to corporate managers and eco-friendly investors.

Corporate biodiversity reporting (CBR) is an under-researched area of environmental accounting literature. Using the Finnish context, this paper extends the existing literature by investigating whether any association exists between CBRD and CEP, which has not been examined before.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether corporate environmental performance (CEP) exerts any significant influence on the voluntary external assurance of sustainability reports.

The sample of this study includes 176 firm-year observations covering an eight-year period (2008-2015) for listed Finnish companies that have issued sustainability reports during the sample period. As the dependent variable “voluntary external assurance” is a binary variable, a logistic regression model has been estimated to observe the effect of CEP on the dependent variable. In addition, a number of control variables have also been included in the empirical model.

The results of this study exhibit that Finnish firms with superior environmental performance in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption have their sustainability reports externally assured. Additionally, among the control variables, firm size, leverage and asset age are found to have significant impact on the adoption of voluntary sustainability assurance (VSA). These results are robust, as they do not change substantially when conducting sub-sample analyses.

The literature on VSA is evolving slowly paying very little attention to the association between CEP and VSA. This empirical research aims to extend such scant literature. The results could have important implications to users of environmental information, managers and regulators.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of structural breaks on the conditional variance of carbon emission allowance prices.

The authors employ the symmetric GARCH model, and two asymmetric models, namely the exponential GARCH and the threshold GARCH.

The authors show that the forecast performance of GARCH models improves after accounting for potential structural changes. Importantly, we observe a significant drop in the volatility persistence of emission prices. In addition, the effects of positive and negative shocks on carbon market volatility increase when breaks are taken into account. Overall, the findings reveal that when structural breaks are ignored in the emission price risk, the volatility persistence is overestimated and the news impact is underestimated.

The authors are the first to examine how the conditional variance of carbon emission allowance prices reacts to structural breaks.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of external assurance on the level of voluntary corporate climate change disclosures by Finnish firms.

The sample of this study includes 228 firm-year observations over the period 2008–2015 for listed Finnish companies that have issued sustainability reports and responded to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire at least once during the sample period. The authors conduct a panel regression analysis to study the afore-mentioned linkage. In addition, the Tobit regression model is also estimated to check the robustness of our findings.

The findings suggest that assurance has a highly significant positive impact on the level of corporate climate change disclosures even after controlling for the effect of a number of control variables. Moreover, among the control variables, firm size and asset age are found to have significant effect on the extent of carbon emissions disclosure. Furthermore, the additional analysis reveals that the type of assurance providers (accounting firms vs non-accounting firms) and the type of financial auditors (Big4 financial auditors vs non-Big4 financial auditors) do not influence the level of climate change disclosure of assured companies.

This research is subject to certain limitations. First, the source of the data used in this research is the CDP database which has limitations in that it is a voluntary disclosure process where all the observations collected are self-reported by the responding firms. This may bias the reported findings. Second, our sample includes only listed companies and hence the results might have limited explanatory capacity for unlisted firms.

By using the results of this research, corporate managers will be able to reduce the information asymmetry between various stakeholders and them through disclosure of accurate, reliable and credible environmental information. Such disclosures will, in turn, allow socially responsible investors to choose eco-friendly investments and will thus enable them to make appropriate investment decisions.

Research on the external assurance-corporate climate change disclosure nexus is scarce. This study addresses this gap in the nonfinancial disclosure assurance literature by demonstrating that external assurance increases the level of voluntary corporate climate change disclosure. Drawing on stakeholder-agency theory, this study views external assurance as a monitoring structure that potentially curbs the monitoring problem between corporate managers and other stakeholders and increases the amount of climate change disclosures making a possible avenue for the reduction of the information asymmetry between them.