Industries Regulation and Firm Environmental Disclosure: A Stakeholders’ Perspective on the Importance of Legitimation and International Activities

Abstract

The potential negative environmental consequences of the activities of international firms has been scrutinized. In response to these pressures, international firms have started to disclose (voluntarily or not) environmental information in order to increase transparency and ensure legitimacy. While several factors have been pointed out as the drivers of such disclosing behavior, the role of industrial regulation has remained underesearched. To better understand this challenge, we rely on a sample of 1,150 international firms (top vs. nontop) worldwide from regulated and unregulated sectors. Our results suggest that unregulated firms disclose—to cope with higher stakeholders pressures—more environmental information than firms operating in regulated environments. Additionally, a firm’s international position positively influences its environmental disclosure, but it does negatively and partially moderate the relationship between industrial regulation of the sector in which the firm operates and such firm’s environmental disclosure. Our findings may also entail interesting contributions both for practitioners and scholars.