Voluntary Disclosure, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Business Performance: Assessing the First Decade of Reporting

This study explores patterns in the voluntary disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and empirical relationships between GHG emissions and an extensive range of business performance measures for UK FTSE-350 listed firms over the first decade of such reporting and highlighting the level of consistency among these measures. Despite the popular and policy generated environmental imperatives over this period, an extensive pattern of non-reporting of such emissions is apparent by year and sector. Accordingly, a two-stage (Heckman type) selection model is used to analyse the emissions-performance nexus conditional upon the firm choosing to report, using bootstrap inference to further ensure robustness of the results. The results demonstrate firstly that emissions reporting are not directly influenced by the social/governance disclosure attitudes of a firm, thus suggesting that firms disassociate environmental responsibility from social responsibility. Additionally it is demonstrated that for those firms that do report, there is a clear non-linear relationship, initially increasing with firm performance and then decreasing.ice elasticities.