Employee stock ownership and voluntary carbon disclosure

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between Employee Stock Ownership (ESO) and voluntary carbon disclosures. Given that previous research has shown the beneficial effects of ESO on work attitudes and corporate performance, we link ESO and board representation with the attributes of voluntary climate-related disclosures. We use three proxies to capture these attributes: corporate decisions to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) annualquestionnaire; corporate decisions to make responses publicly available, and the quality of a firm’s disclosures on climate-changerelated risks and strategies to mitigate them. Our results show a positive association between ESO and decisions to both answer the CDP questionnaire, and make responses publicly available. In contrast, ESO does not seem to impact carbon disclosure quality. The findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the determinantsof voluntary climate change disclosures, highlighting the importance of ESO to enhance the transparency of voluntary disclosures of climate change business impacts.