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This paper aims to measure the COVID-19-related disclosure extent of listed firms in Vietnam and its associated factors.

The authors apply a previously developed reporting framework to evaluate the disclosures of 100 listed firms with the largest market capitalization on the Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh stock exchanges as of 31 December 2021. The disclosures were from integrated reports, annual reports, corporate governance reports and financial statements. The authors then used a regression model to examine the factors that influenced the disclosures, such as corporate governance, ownership concentration and firm profiles.

The research results reveal that the extent of COVID-19-related disclosure in Vietnam is relatively low. It also finds that the audit committee, firm size, age and industry are positively associated with the extent of COVID-19-related disclosure.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine COVID-19-related disclosures of listed companies in Vietnam and their determinants. It contributes significantly to the empirical evidence in this field. The findings of this study can help corporate managers and policymakers to improve information disclosure practices during future financial crises.

The purpose of this study is to analyse different factors behind the disclosure of corporate information on issues related to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change world‐wide.

The empirical analysis carried out was performed in two stages: analysis of the data obtained through content analysis and analysis of the factors that influence the disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change using a dependency model, a multiple linear regression. Several variables were introduced to represent the size of the companies, leverage, return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Market‐to‐Book ratio. Also, other dummy variables have been incorporated: Kyoto Protocol, activity sector in which the company operates and inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

The results obtained show a direct relationship between corporate size, its market capitalization and the disclosure of information in addition to proposed Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) indicators on greenhouse gas emissions. Conversely, an inverse relationship between ROE and disclosure is detected.

The findings emphasize that the main quoted companies operating in industries related to greenhouse gas emissions typically reveal information on almost all the GRI core indicators as well as the additional items specifically proposed for this issue. Moreover, the results suggest a trend for companies to utilize information on greenhouse gas emissions as a mechanism that enables them to legitimise themselves with those groups that can be of benefit to them.

The paper has analysed the disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions and other information of importance to climate change in companies from different countries, some of which have ratified, approved, adhered to or accepted the Kyoto Protocol, and some of which have still not accepted it.

This paper aims to investigate the greenhouse gas (GHG)-related disclosure trends, content and strategies of the eight most high GHG-emitting Chinese power companies, over a period when government pressure to manage GHG emissions increased.

Data were collected from the 2000-2009 annual reports, corporate social and environmental responsibility reports and websites of eight Chinese power companies. Content analysis results were supplemented with excerpts from documents written in English or Chinese. Legitimacy theory informed the interpretation of the findings.

GHG-related disclosures increased from 2002 when the Chinese Government ratified the Kyoto Protocol and promulgated stringent environmental regulations. However, some expected types of GHG-related disclosure were absent or rare. Disclosure practices were found to be underpinned by reputation management objectives and reflected a symbolic rather than substantive legitimation strategy.

This study extends the literature on GHG-related disclosures by carbon-intensive firms and points to the need for future research to examine such disclosures in different countries to appreciate the variety in practice.

While the Chinese Government appears to have driven the emergence of GHG-related disclosure practices, companies can effect improvement by expanding the scope and content of what they disclose. Also, the growing emphasis on website disclosures may present challenges in ensuring the reliability and assurance of GHG disclosures.

This is the first study to examine GHG-related disclosure practices by Chinese power-generating companies, a sector crucial to managing the GHG effects of China’s significant economic growth.

Cities are crucial to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper aims to explore the quality of GHG disclosures by cities via the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and compares them with the expectations of users.

The expectation gap framework is used to examine the GHG disclosure quality of 42 cities. User expectations are determined via a literature review and CDP documentation. City disclosures are reviewed using content analysis.

GHG information at the city level is outdated, incomplete, inconsistent, inaccurate and incomparable and, therefore, to meet user expectations, improvement is needed.

The findings have implications for policymakers, stakeholders and managers. Guidelines are required for better disclosure of GHG information relating to cities, and stakeholders need to develop better skills to understand emissions information. Managers have a responsibility to measure, disclose and mitigate GHG emissions to meet the expectations of stakeholders.

Prior studies focus on GHG disclosures via the CDP by corporations. This is the first accounting study to examine GHG disclosures by cities via the CDP. The expectation gap framework is a novel approach to sustainability disclosure research.

This paper aims to examine whether the amount of costs disclosed as relating to environmental controls is associated with environmental performance in terms of carbon-based eco-efficiency, and whether any relation supports voluntary disclosure theory or legitimacy theory arguments. Further, this paper attempts to determine whether the relations differ across the initial Kyoto Protocol period.

In this study, the focus was on Japanese firms over the period from 2002 to 2012. Disclosed environmental control costs (capital expenditures and operating costs) were identified and eco-efficiency measures based on carbon emissions were calculated. Relations were tested for using regression models controlling for other potential impact factors.

This study’s results indicate a negative relation between disclosed levels of environmental control costs and eco-efficiency performance measures, and, for two of our three eco-efficiency metrics, this is more pronounced over the Kyoto Protocol period.

These results support a legitimacy theory (as opposed to voluntary disclosure theory) explanation for the relation between the levels of disclosed environmental control costs and carbon-based eco-efficiency.

This study is the first to explore how flexibility in cost classification may be used by companies to foster a disclosure strategy.

This study aims to identify a relationship between the presence of women on the board of directors (BOD) of Brazilian companies and the firms’ disclosure and participation in projects or initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The research used an adaptation of the model by Ben-Amar et al. (2017), added two other gender variables and analyzed a sample of 42 companies listed on the Brazilian stock exchange that participate in the Brazilian GHG protocol program. As for the models with the variables of interest, the most significant was the female percentage, Blau’s index, the dummy of female presence, the number of women on BOD, total years with the woman on board and the number of committees the board women were.

The results for the sample showed that women were present on the BOD 475 times, against a male presence of 4,538 times. Empirical evidence confirms the research hypothesis that there is a positive relationship between the presence of women on the BOD and the likelihood of participation in the Brazilian GHG protocol program.

The fact that few companies are listed on Brasil, Bolsa and Balcão and participate in the Brazilian GHG protocol program. Therefore, the impact of these findings may be reduced when compared with countries presenting more listed companies that have joined this type of program to diminish GHG emissions.

This study contributes to the literature on accounting, discussing carbon accounting in the field of environmental accounting and emphasizing that climate change-related risks greatly influence business and corporate assets. According to an article published by the World Resources Institute Brasil (2019), Brazil is the seventh country with the highest GHG emissions in the world.

The purpose of this paper is to seek to shed light on the practice of incomplete corporate disclosure of quantitative Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and investigates whether external stakeholder pressure influences the existence, and separately, the completeness of voluntary GHG emissions disclosures by 431 European companies.

A classification of reporting completeness is developed with respect to the scope, type and reporting boundary of GHG emissions based on the guidelines of the GHG Protocol, Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project. Logistic regression analysis is applied to examine whether proxies for exposure to climate change concerns from different stakeholder groups influence the existence and/or completeness of quantitative GHG emissions disclosure.

From 2005 to 2009, on average only 15 percent of companies that disclose GHG emissions report them in a manner that the authors consider complete. Results of regression analyses suggest that external stakeholder pressure is a determinant of the existence but not the completeness of emissions disclosure. Findings are consistent with stakeholder theory arguments that companies respond to external stakeholder pressure to report GHG emissions, but also with legitimacy theory claims that firms can use carbon disclosure, in this case the incomplete reporting of emissions, as a symbolic act to address legitimacy exposures.

Bringing corporate GHG emissions disclosure in line with recommended guidelines will require either more direct stakeholder pressure or, perhaps, a mandated disclosure regime. In the meantime, users of the data will need to carefully consider the relevance of the reported data and develop the necessary competencies to detect and control for its incompleteness. A more troubling concern is that stakeholders may instead grow to accept less than complete disclosure.

The paper represents the first large-scale empirical study into the completeness of companies’ disclosure of quantitative GHG emissions and is the first to analyze these disclosures in the context of stakeholder pressure and its relation to legitimation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the evolution of greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting quality and to determine whether the evolution of reporting quality is linked with the type of information reported based on the “search”, “experience”, and “credence” typology.

The method is based on the content analysis of GHG reporting in 245 sustainability reports by 45 oil and gas companies between 1998 and 2010. The content analysis disclosure index developed links GHG reporting requirements with seven quality dimensions. The information associated with each item on the content analysis index is classified as “search”, “experience” or “credence”. Statistical analysis is used to determine whether any significant change occurred in either overall GHG reporting quality or in the quality of reporting in any of the individual dimensions of quality over the period of the study.

GHG reporting quality has not improved significantly between 1998 and 2010. The quality of reporting is not the same in each of the seven dimensions of quality and this can be explained by information typology.

This paper provides the first longitudinal analysis of the quality of GHG reporting. The methodology developed advances current measures of reporting quality by linking reporting requirements with particular quality dimensions. The results show that the type of information is important in terms of quality evolution and that this can dictate the measures required to improve quality.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between level of environmental disclosure and establishment of a legitimacy image of operation among Japanese firms after implementation of the Kyoto Protocol.

This study uses a sample consisting of 208 firms listed in the Japan Nikkei Stock Index 500 and adopts three-stage least-squares (3SLS) to explore the relationship between environmental news exposure, environmental disclosure in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, and environmental legitimacy.

Results indicate that firms from environmentally-sensitive industries can significantly improve their perceived legitimacy by releasing CSR reports; firms with better prior environmental legitimacy will be more active in environmental disclosure and establish better environmental legitimacy in the next period; firms with better carbon reduction performance tend to have higher levels of environmental disclosure. In terms of carbon reduction performance, Japanese firms in the sample may reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 49.636 tons by allocating one million yens (approximately 9,670.3 euros or 12,328 US dollars) to environmental expenditure.

The top three items of environmental disclosure in most Japanese firms ' CSR reports are environmental management, development of alternative energies, and ecological information. These results reveal environmental behavior of sample firms in Japan to mitigate global warming. The managers should understand that the impact of substantive actions for environmental management on legitimacy is greater.

Environmental management has become an important component of business management beliefs for most firms, and Japanese firms that belong to environmentally-sensitive industries are even more active in using CSR reports as an effective tool to establish their legitimacy image.

Institutional governance theory is used to explain voluntary corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting in the context of a market governance system in the absence of climate change public policy. This paper seeks to hypothesise that GHG reporting is related to internal organisation systems, external privately promulgated guidance and EU ETS trading.

A two‐stage approach is used. The initial model examines whether firms' GHG disclosures are associated with internal organisation systems factors: environmental management systems (EMS), corporate governance quality and environmental management committees as well as external private guidance provided by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) for 187 ASX 300 firms. EU ETS trading is also included. Determinants of the extent and credibility of GHG disclosure is examined in the second stage where an index constructed from the GHG reporting standard “ISO 14064‐1” items for a sub‐sample of 80 disclosing firms as the dependent variable.

Firms that voluntarily disclose GHGs have EMSs (uncertified and certified), higher corporate governance quality and publicly report to the CDP, tend to be large and in the energy and mining and industrial sectors. The credibility and extent of disclosures are related to the existence of a certified EMS, public reporting to the CDP, and use of the GRI. Firms that disclose more credible information are more likely to be large and in the energy and mining, industrial and services sectors.

The paper shows that some proactive but pragmatic Australian firms are disclosing their GHGs voluntarily for competitive advantage in the current market governance system in the absence of public policy.