Environmental disclosure as a response to civil liberties and political rights in countries, myth or reality? The moderating role performed by board gender diversity

Abstract

The influence of civil liberties and political rights on environmental disclosure, and the moderating effect of board gender diversity on the relationship between civil liberties and political rights and environmental disclosure, have not to date been studied in detail, as evidenced by the previous literature available. Therefore, this study aims to analyse how these institutional factors affect corporate environmental disclosure practices across different countries. The firms in our sample operate in 36 countries, spread across all the continents, and the period covered is 2009–2019. The database used to collect economic, social, environmental and governance data is Thomson Reuters' ASSET4, while the items for measuring civil liberty and political rights scores come from the Freedom House organisation (https://freedomhouse.org). The method used for estimating the model is the generalised method of moments (GMM) proposed by Arellano and Bond. The main findings of the study show that levels of civil liberty and political rights in the countries where the firms operate are positively associated with environmental disclosure. Furthermore, according to our evidence, the presence of female directors on boards plays a positive moderating role in the relationship between the level of civil liberty and environmental disclosure and between political rights and environmental disclosure. Additional robustness analyses corroborate our findings.