Corporate Voluntary Carbon Information Disclosure: Evidence from China's Listed Companies

This article seeks to answer two questions: (i) what factors drive firms to decide whether or not to disclose the information related to their greenhouse gas emissions (also called carbon information)? (ii) what forces lead firms to disclose more carbon information? Using data hand-collected from the annual Corporate Social Responsibility reports of China's listed companies from 2008 to 2012, we find the following: (i) firms that operate in sectors of high-emission industries are more likely to make carbon information disclosure (CID hereafter); (ii) the more companies within one industry that make CID, the more likely it is that a company in that industry will make CID; (iii) companies having a higher sales rank within an industry are more likely to make CID.