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This paper aims to examine the effect of critical mass of women managers on corporate boards on the voluntary disclosure of climate change in a developing country in which the regulations on climate change disclosure is an area of growing research interest.

This study uses logistic panel regression models with a sample of 1,001 firm-years for companies in the Borsa Istanbul 100 Index that were asked to disclose voluntary climate change indicators over the seven-year period from 2014 to 2020 through the Carbon Disclosure Project.

This paper provides evidence from an emerging country that the critical mass of women on the board has no impact on voluntary climate change disclosure. In addition, the presence of independent managers on the board was found to have a significant impact on climate change disclosure. In addition, the results show that larger companies are more likely to report their climate change activities. Large companies are more visible due to their size, are perceived by stakeholders as more polluting and are, therefore, more likely to report on the environment.

The results show that the critical mass of women on the board has no effect on voluntary disclosure of climate change. Empirical tests are still needed to strengthen the overall validity of the critical mass of at least three women on boards in Türkiye.

Despite many valuable insights provided by critical mass theory, very few studies directly address critical mass and voluntary disclosure of climate change. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first empirical and comprehensive paper in the Turkish context evaluating critical masses and voluntary corporate climate change giving a comparison between firms listed on financial industry and nonfinancial industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether information asymmetry mediates the relationship between disclosure and cost of equity.

The study is based on a sample of 500 companies listed in Bombay Stock Exchange for a period of six years from 2015 to 2021. Panel data regression is applied to analyze the relationship between voluntary disclosure, cost of equity and information asymmetry. Mediation effect of information asymmetry is tested with the help of Barron and Kenny’s (1986) approach.

Findings suggest that in case of Indian companies, disclosure reduces cost of equity directly and indirectly through mediation of information asymmetry. Indian investors value credible information for better estimation of future returns, supporting the validity of estimation risk and stock market liquidity hypothesis, which proposes an inverse relationship between disclosure and cost of equity.

Managers can use the findings to strategize their disclosure policy and secure funds at lower cost. Shareholders can monitor managerial actions by demanding credible disclosures. Government too can encourage voluntary disclosure by providing special incentives to the firms.

This study is a pioneering research that investigates the mediating influence of information asymmetry between disclosure and cost of equity with reference to the Indian corporate landscape.

Corporate disclosures are essential because they provide transparent and accurate information about a company's financial health, performance, risks and governance practices. They enable investors to make informed decisions, promote market efficiency and maintain trust in the financial system. This paper uses bibliometrics to identify the intellectual composition of the literature on corporate disclosure.

Based on the bibliometric information of 4,551 articles on corporate disclosure research, the authors conducted citation, keyword co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling and publication analyses to elucidate the leading articles, authors, sources, institutions, countries, themes and topics in the field of corporate disclosure from the 1960s to 2021.

The findings of this review demonstrate that corporate disclosure research is based on four broad themes – the role of disclosure in capital markets, non-financial disclosure, determinants of corporate disclosure and firm risk and intellectual capital disclosure. This review suggests that management should pay attention to the financial and non-financial corporate information that investors, regulators and the government emphasise.

This paper is the first comprehensive bibliometric review on corporate disclosure. It summarises the regulatory shifts, technological changes and industry trends that have influenced corporate disclosure research. Besides identifying broad research themes, the authors performed bibliographic coupling for research on disclosure sources, including annual reports, management forecasts, earnings calls, press releases, the Internet and social media, to reveal the thematic clusters related to these sources.

This study investigates the impact of environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure on firm financial performance under a mandatory disclosure regime in Hong Kong.

The authors examine the largest 109 firms listed on the Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX) as of the financial year of 2019. The authors use a manually constructed index based on the most current 2019 ESG Reporting Guide launched by HKEX, followed by quantitative statistical methods using a model that follows the valuation framework by Ohlson.

The authors find a significant positive association between total ESG disclosure level and firm financial performance in the main tests. However, when the total ESG scores are partitioned into environmental and social subscores, the results show that only social disclosures are value relevant. Moreover, the results demonstrate that environmental and social subscores are both significant when return on assets (ROA) is used as a dependent variable. Furthermore, the robustness tests show that only qualitative ESG information is value relevant to share prices, while both quantitative and qualitative ESG information are relevant to ROA. In addition, the disclosure quality of annual reports alone is good in explaining the firm financial performance in this study.

This study contributes to existing non-financial reporting literature using hand-collected data as well as examining the firm financial performance of ESG reporting under the mandatory disclosure regime in the Hong Kong context.

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 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.

Unlike other types of corporate disclosure, corporate political disclosure (CPD), which is the disclosure of corporate political contributions and the related governing policies and oversight mechanisms, does not provide completely new information to stakeholders. Some of the information disclosed in CPD is available from other public records (e.g. the Federal Election Committee website or OpenSecrets website). Given this unique feature of CPD, it is interesting to investigate the cost and benefit tradeoff for firms of altering their CPD practice in response to policy and political uncertainty.

This study employs recently developed indexes of aggregate economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and a novel dataset of CPD transparency to examine the impact of EPU on CPD transparency and how the proprietary cost of corporate political activities moderates this association. The sample consists of S&P 500 companies from the 2012 to 2019 period.

The authors document that firms mitigate the heightened information asymmetry associated with higher aggregate EPU by increasing CPD transparency. The positive association between EPU and CPD is less pronounced for firms that are more sensitive to EPU, for firms that more actively manage EPU through corporate political contributions or lobbying activities and for firms that are followed by more analysts. The authors also find that more transparent CPD helps to mitigate the information asymmetry caused by heightened EPU. This study’s results hold when the authors control for other types of voluntary corporate disclosure.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the determinants of CPD transparency by identifying EPU's positive impact on CPD transparency. This study also provides empirical evidence that the proprietary costs arising from the controversial nature of corporate political activities dampen firms' incentives to provide transparent CPD in response to heightened EPU, and that information on corporate political activities gathered and processed by financial analysts seems to lower the marginal benefit to companies of publicizing CPD on their own website.

This study aims to examine how audit committee (AC) attributes influence quality and quantity disclosure of energy consumed by the listed nonfinancial firms for the period of five years (2016–2020). The study aims at providing empirical evidence on how board of director’s independence influences the relationship between AC attributes and firms’ energy in achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) on world climate policy.

The study obtained data from a sample of 83 listed nonfinancial firms, content analysis technique was used to compute energy disclosure indexes using global reporting initiative standards, while regression analysis was conducted to test the relationship among research variables.

The study revealed that AC independence, diversity and meetings were significantly related with energy disclosure. Also, the study found that other variables were insignificantly related with energy disclosure.

The study is constrained for not considering all listed firms in the country. Furthermore, the study considered selected attributes, other important audit-committee size attributes such as audit-committee size, audit-committee size tenure could be study in by the future study.

The study’s findings would have practical implications for corporations and other business organizations seeking to actively involve the energy-related SDGs 7 and 13 in their business models and successfully communicate these efforts to stakeholders.

To the best of author’s knowledge, this is the first study that provides empirical evidence on the effect of AC attributes on the energy disclosure using effect of board independence as moderator in Nigeria.

This paper aims to empirically examine the impact of mandatory CSR disclosure on the CEO pay performance sensitivity.

Using the mandatory requirement of CSR disclosure as an exogenous shock, the authors compare the changes in CEO pay performance sensitivity for treatment firms with control firms through a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach.

The authors find that mandatory CSR disclosure enhances CEO pay performance sensitivity. The results also show that monitoring CEO power is a conduit through which mandatory CSR disclosure affects CEO pay performance sensitivity. The positive impact is more profound in firms with a powerful CEO, i.e. one who is politically well-connected, holds dual roles as both CEO and Chairman, and/or has had a long tenure. Furthermore, the increased CEO pay performance sensitivity after the mandate is prominent among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) only.

The findings of this paper have implications for other economies with similar institutional backgrounds as China. Although the mandatory CSR disclosure does not require firms to spend on CSR investment, the mandatory CSR disclosure alters firm behaviour, and mitigates agency problems.

This paper contributes to the studies on the impact of CSR disclosure on firms' behaviour. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to examine the effects of mandatory CSR disclosure on CEO pay performance sensitivity using the quasi-natural experiment settings.

This study aims to examine whether the newly available auditor tenure information is associated with non-GAAP earnings, as the recent requirement to disclose the initial year of auditor-client relationship in audit reports may give the impression that longer auditor tenure may be related to lower audit quality.

Using a sample of firm-quarters from 2017 to 2020, the authors conduct both univariate and regression analyses. We use hand-collected data for auditor tenure, SEC comment letters, and non-GAAP variables.

First, the authors find that the likelihood of disclosing non-GAAP earnings monotonically increases with auditor tenure on a univariate basis. Second, auditor tenure is negatively associated with aggressive non-GAAP reporting. Third, the authors document evidence of aggressive reporting in general; that is, items excluded in calculating non-GAAP earnings are associated with future performance. However, the association declines with longer auditor tenure. Finally, the authors report evidence that the likelihood of receiving an SEC comment letter that contains non-GAAP comments decreases with longer auditor tenure.

The results show that regulators need to consider both GAAP and non-GAAP disclosures’ costs and benefits when enacting auditor tenure regulation. Investors can benefit from the findings in evaluating the quality of non-GAAP earnings. The findings are also relevant to the SEC when allocating limited resources in monitoring non-GAAP reporting.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study showing that auditor tenure is associated with the quality of non-GAAP earnings. Given that financial reporting quality should be understood as a comprehensive system comprising both mandatory and voluntary disclosures, this study complements the literature that examines the effect of auditor tenure on financial reporting quality using GAAP reporting.