Analysis of Green Disclosure Determinants in Annual Reports of BM&FBOVESPA Listed Companies

This study sought to identify the determinants of environmental disclosure by business firms in Brazil. To this end, we selected a sample of companies listed on the BM&FBovespa stock exchange classified as having high, medium and low environmental impact levels in accordance with Brazilian law no. 10.165/2000. For the construction of the dependent variable, we employed content and lexical analysis using a set of expressions relating to green disclosure. The results of this analysis revealed the words and phrases most used, their associations with each other and the levels of green disclosure of the companies composing the sample. Then regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses of Murcia, Favero, Rover, Lima, & Lima (2008) and two others. Although some determinants were confirmed problems of heteroscedasticity and non-normality of the distribution of residuals made it impossible to test the hypotheses. These results suggest that Murcia et al. (2008) may not have considered the problems identified in our study, since they make no mention of them. Further research is therefore recommended, involving discussion of new variables for identifying the determinants of green disclosure.