Purpose

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of external assurance on the level of voluntary corporate climate change disclosures by Finnish firms.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample of this study includes 228 firm-year observations over the period 2008–2015 for listed Finnish companies that have issued sustainability reports and responded to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire at least once during the sample period. The authors conduct a panel regression analysis to study the afore-mentioned linkage. In addition, the Tobit regression model is also estimated to check the robustness of our findings.

Findings

The findings suggest that assurance has a highly significant positive impact on the level of corporate climate change disclosures even after controlling for the effect of a number of control variables. Moreover, among the control variables, firm size and asset age are found to have significant effect on the extent of carbon emissions disclosure. Furthermore, the additional analysis reveals that the type of assurance providers (accounting firms vs non-accounting firms) and the type of financial auditors (Big4 financial auditors vs non-Big4 financial auditors) do not influence the level of climate change disclosure of assured companies.

Research limitations/implications

This research is subject to certain limitations. First, the source of the data used in this research is the CDP database which has limitations in that it is a voluntary disclosure process where all the observations collected are self-reported by the responding firms. This may bias the reported findings. Second, our sample includes only listed companies and hence the results might have limited explanatory capacity for unlisted firms.

Practical implications

By using the results of this research, corporate managers will be able to reduce the information asymmetry between various stakeholders and them through disclosure of accurate, reliable and credible environmental information. Such disclosures will, in turn, allow socially responsible investors to choose eco-friendly investments and will thus enable them to make appropriate investment decisions.

Originality/value

Research on the external assurance-corporate climate change disclosure nexus is scarce. This study addresses this gap in the nonfinancial disclosure assurance literature by demonstrating that external assurance increases the level of voluntary corporate climate change disclosure. Drawing on stakeholder-agency theory, this study views external assurance as a monitoring structure that potentially curbs the monitoring problem between corporate managers and other stakeholders and increases the amount of climate change disclosures making a possible avenue for the reduction of the information asymmetry between them.

中文翻译：

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外部保证对公司气候变化披露的影响：芬兰的新证据

目的

这项研究的目的是检验外部保证对芬兰公司自愿性公司气候变化披露水平的影响。

设计/方法/方法

本研究的样本包括在2008-2015年期间对芬兰上市公司进行的228个公司年观察，这些公司已发布可持续性报告并在样本期内至少对碳披露项目（CDP）问卷进行了一次答复。作者进行了面板回归分析，以研究上述联系。此外，还估计了Tobit回归模型以检查我们发现的稳健性。

发现

研究结果表明，即使在控制了许多控制变量的影响之后，保证对于公司气候变化披露的水平也具有非常显着的积极影响。此外，在控制变量中，发现公司规模和资产寿命对碳排放披露程度有重大影响。此外，进一步的分析表明，担保提供者的类型（会计公司与非会计公司）和财务审计师的类型（Big4财务审计师与非Big4财务审计师）不影响被担保公司的气候变化披露水平。 。

研究局限/意义

该研究受到某些限制。首先，本研究使用的数据来源是CDP数据库，该数据库具有局限性，因为它是一个自愿披露过程，在此过程中，收集到的所有观察结果都是由响应公司自行报告的。这可能会使报告的发现有偏差。其次，我们的样本仅包括上市公司，因此结果对非上市公司的解释能力可能有限。

实际影响

通过使用这项研究的结果，公司经理将能够通过披露准确，可靠和可信的环境信息来减少各种利益相关者与他们之间的信息不对称。反过来，此类披露将使对社会负责的投资者能够选择对环境友好的投资，从而使他们能够做出适当的投资决策。

创意/价值

缺乏关于外部保证的企业气候变化披露关系的研究。本研究通过证明外部保证提高了自愿性公司气候变化披露的水平，解决了非财务披露保证文献中的这一空白。该研究基于利益相关者－代理理论，将外部保证视为一种监视结构，可以潜在地遏制公司经理与其他利益相关者之间的监视问题，并增加了气候变化披露的数量，为减少它们之间的信息不对称性提供了可能。