Do actions speak louder than words? An empirical investigation of corporate environmental reputation

Trends and determinants of corporate non-financial disclosure in Greece

“…Nevertheless, contrary to findings offered by Tagesson et al (2009) regarding state-owned firms in Sweden, Greek government-owned firms are not actively engaged in NFD which is mostly likely explained by inefficiencies and intrinsic characteristics of the state apparatus and public management as well as aspects of domestic socio-cultural tradition. Finally, our findings with respect to firms under scrutiny for their environmental responsibility in the Asopos area is in line with prior literature which suggests that organizations with questionable non-financial performance and, consequently, greater exposure to social scrutiny have a strong incentive to employ disclosure in an attempt to address the negative effects of such exposure on organizational image and reputation (Hughes et al, 2001;Patten, 2002;Cho and Patten, 2007;Cho et al, 2012).…”

A comprehensive literature review on, and the construction of a framework for, environmental legitimacy, accountability and proactivity

“…In their study, they find no significant difference in the level of toxic releases between companies included in the ratings and companies that were not, suggesting that these ratings/rakings were nothing more than a public relations tool. In another study, Cho et al (2012) found firms with better environmental performance tend to have lower reputation scores (based on the Newsweek magazine ranking of the American greenest companies) and were more likely to be a member of Dow Jones Sustainability Index. This is in contrast to the finding of Klassen and McLaughlin (1996) implying that the award-winning samples produced significantly lower toxic releases than their counterparts.…”

Improving global environmental management with standard corporate reporting

“…The result is a pattern of selective environmental disclosure whereby companies tend to report outcome metrics that make their performance look good (20,21). The point of environmental disclosure should be to manage toward improved performance, but rarely is there a link between disclosure and actions that lead to observed improved performance (63,64).…”