Abstract
Firms worldwide have been facing an increasing pressure to disclose their Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions since GHG emissions are seen as the main source of global warming which is one of the most challenging problems that the world is faced with. For this reason, voluntary GHG disclosure represents a growing area of research interest. However, the existing research generally focuses on developed countries. In this sense, the present paper aims to contribute to the existing GHG disclosure literature by analyzing the determinants of voluntary disclosure of firms operating in a developing country, Turkey. The effects of both financial characteristics and board structures of firms on voluntary disclosure decisions are analyzed as the possible determinants of GHG disclosures of Turkish firms. We use two proxies for assessing the firms’ GHG disclosures. The first proxy, “sensitiveness tendency”, indicates the response behavior of firms to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) survey. The second proxy, namely, “transparence tendency”, represents the disclosure behavior of firms. Using logistic regression models with a sample of 84 listed Turkish companies which were included in the Carbon Disclosure Project survey in 2014, 2015 and 2016, we find that firm size, institutional ownership and market value are positively related to the sensitivity of sampled firms, while board size is negatively related. On the other hand, our results indicate that firm size, profitability and institutional ownership have positive impacts on the transparency of Turkish listed firms.
Highlights
Climate change, in other words, global warming has been regarded as one of the major environmental issues that the world is faced with in the 21st century [1,2,3,4,5,6]
This paper aims to examine which of the key firm characteristics, namely, firm size, profitability, leverage, institutional ownership, industrial membership and market value and corporate governance variables such as board size and independence influence the disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for a sample of 252 firm-year observations listed on the Borsa Istanbul (BIST) over the period 2014–2016
In order to determine the association between profitability and GHG disclosures of Turkish listed firms, we proposed our second hypothesis as; Hypothesis 2a (H2a)
Summary
In other words, global warming has been regarded as one of the major environmental issues that the world is faced with in the 21st century [1,2,3,4,5,6]. According to the Fifth Assessment Report of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was founded by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization for the purpose of providing the most updated and comprehensive scientific, technical and socio-economic information about climate change, the globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature rose approximately 0.85 ◦C over the period of 1880 to 2012. There is a growing scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human-related activities are the main causes of global warming [6,12,13,14,15]. The report of IPCC demonstrates that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere have increased substantially since 1750 (40%, 150% and 20% respectively). The average rate of increase of these GHGs observed over the past century is higher than any observed rate of change over the previous 20,000 years [21]
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