The globalization of corporate environmental disclosure

Despite the increase in corporate environmental disclosure, there remains substantial heterogeneity in the extent to which corporations reveal their environmental impacts. To better understand this heterogeneity, we identify key country- and organization-level determinants of corporate environmental disclosure. We focus on institutional factors related to firms' global embeddedness to describe how external environmental pressures emanating from governments and civil society influence corporations environmental transparency. We also focus on the extent to which corporate environmental disclosure is symbolic and, in particular, what leads corporations to selectively disclose relatively benign environmental impacts to create an impression of transparency while masking their true environmental performance. We hypothesize that key organizational characteristics reflecting visibility, such as size and environmental impact, shape this type of symbolic compliance and that these relationships are moderated by institutional pressures. We test our hypotheses using a novel panel dataset of 4,646 public companies in many industries, headquartered in 46 countries during 2005-2008, when environmental disclosure increased among many global corporations. Controlling for a host of organizational, industry, and national characteristics, we find evidence to support most of our hypothesized relationships. Contributions to understanding the decoupling of globalization processes and how organizations respond to institutional change are discussed.