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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the development of environmental disclosure during periods of voluntarism and during periods with changed statutory requirements. More specific, the question is how volume and content variety of environmental disclosure in financial statements are immediately affected by statutory regulations.Design/methodology/approachIn order to compare the effects of such regulations with the development in environmental disclosure during periods without any changes in statutory requirements, a longitudinal study is conducted to test five specific hypotheses. A quasi‐experiment with pre‐ and post‐testing of disclosure volume and content variety is carried out to test the effects of the statutory changes.FindingsThe most important lesson from this paper is the significance of the voluntary approach to improve the variety of environmental disclosure. The present paper supports the claim of voluntarism that companies will meet the heterogeneous requirements of their stakeholders without any governmental regulations. No statutory regulations are needed to make the companies increase and adapt their environmental disclosure to the demand from their stakeholders and legitimate their existence towards society. The present paper has revealed that the regulation approach has a significant, immediate effect on mandatory environmental disclosure only, and that companies do not fully comply with such statutory regulations.Research limitations/implicationsThere is no universal notion of voluntarism. Different countries and societies have different legal requirements and political cultures regarding voluntarism. That is, voluntary reporting in Norway is affected by the national statutory requirements and may be underpinned by a certain set of societal responsibilities that may or may not exist elsewhere. Further research is needed to see whether these findings are readily generalized or whether they should only be interpreted in light of local considerations.Originality/valueThis is the first comprehensive study of the development of environmental disclosure in Norwegian companies. A total of 822 financial statements and annual reports, during the period between 1987 and 2005, are analysed.

Purpose – This paper aims to explore whether internal context – decision-makers’ perception of characteristics of the information content – might predict the variation in adoption rates of different types of content, and whether innovation adoption theory might represent important factors of this decision-making process Corporate management decides what types of environmental information content to disclose/adopt. Design/methodology/approach – Actual adoption rates of 13 information content categories are computed using content analysis of annual reports for 62 listed companies. Each content category is seen as an innovation the company decides to adopt or not. Interviews with management in several companies illustrate the decision process of disclosure, and help predict adoption rates. Predicted and actual adoption rates are compared. Findings – Adoption rates vary considerably among the 13 types of content. The absolute level of adoption rates is affected by company size and environmental risk. However, those content categories that have either relatively high or low adoption rates are consistent among the subsamples, regardless of these corporate characteristics. This consistent variation in adoption rates seems to be predicted well by innovation adoption theory and its focus on the five attributes of the information itself: compatibility, trialability, complexity, observability and relative advantage. Research limitations/implications – The theoretical framework allows for different or changing internal and general contexts, and should be applicable to other settings, even though the particular predictions for adoption rates in this paper may not be applied as such. Originality/value – The level of analysis is changed from company level, which dominates previous research, to information content (individual content categories). Perceived attributes of the information content itself and innovation adoption theory are used for the first time to explain reason for the reporting practice, and are considered fruitful tools to predict consistent variations in adoption rates among different types of content. This approach provides new insight into the driving forces of supply of disclosure.

This study explores how four different types of environmental reporting regulations affect reporting practices. Accounting Act requirements, accounting standard requirements, accounting standard recommendations, and no regulation/voluntary disclosure are associated with different levels of reporting obligations. Disclosures made by enterprises subject to regulations are compared with those of enterprises that are not. There are separate regression models for each type of regulation. The sample consists of 235 enterprises from the private and public sectors. Content analysis is used to measure environmental disclosure.Enterprises subject to regulations report significantly more types of the information content required by law than other enterprises, which is in line with the higher regulatory legitimacy risk. There is no such difference in disclosure between the two groups of enterprises for the information required and recommended by the accounting standard. This may suggest that pragmatic, cognitive, and moral legitimacy issues outweigh the regulatory legitimacy risk for these types of information, or that legitimacy risks are generally low. Enforcement of regulations will increase the regulatory risk. For information that is voluntary for all enterprises to disclose, enterprises that are not subject to any regulations report significantly more types of information than those that are. This result is not in line with predictions made from any of the four types of legitimacy. Some alternative explanations are discussed.Since regulatory regimes may include several types of means, the main contribution is the comparison of four types of regulations within the same regime, as opposed to analysing only one

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