This article empirically investigates the impact of corporate governance attributes on companies' decision to disclose environmental information since corporate governance ensures fair, responsible, credible and transparent corporate behaviours to its stakeholders. The corporate governance attributes used in the study are board size, chief executive officer duality, domestic institutional ownership and foreign institutional ownership. Environmental disclosures are measured by a checklist of items based on Global Reporting Initiative guidelines as well as environmental regulations prevailing in India. Disclosure scores are drawn individually by using content analysis of annual reports for a sample of 177 most polluting companies in India for a period of 6 years, that is, from 2009-2010 to 2014-2015. Employing panel data regression model, the result indicates that foreign institutional ownership is the most important corporate governance attribute that engages corporates in environmental disclosure behaviour. In addition to this, firm-specific characteristics such as company size and environmental certification are more likely to influence environmental disclosures. For better environmental disclosure, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) should mandate all the companies to disclose detailed monetary and non-monetary information on environmental issues in their companies' periodic report and also more emphasis should be given to strengthen the corporate governance attributes.
This article primarily investigates the association between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and financial performance (FP) of a firm and it also examines the effects of good, mixed, and poor environmental performers on FP. To achieve the objective, annual reports of 145 most polluting companies in India have been used from 2009–2010 to 2018–2019. On the basis of Global Reporting Initiative framework, the CEP scores have been measured in terms of quantitative (binary coding system) and qualitative (three-point scale) aspects using the content analysis technique. Subsequently, the scores are used to analyse the linkage between CEP disclosure and firms’ FP. Employing static and dynamic panel data analyses, the study observes quantitative as well as qualitative CEP performs significant part in expanding the firms’ market value and also notices innovation oriented investment boost the FP. On the contrary, the study finds out the expenditure on research and development and CEP together negatively influence firms’ FP. Further, it also reveals good performers make better CEP disclosure in their annual reports compared with mixed and poor performers on all aspects of environmental performance indicators of GRI guidelines and also observes a positive linkage between good performers and firm’s FP.
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