Environmental transparency and performance: Does the corporate governance matter?

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how corporate governance can impact on environmental transparency and performance. We focus on firms possessing green patents because they are active in proposing new technologies helping to reduce human impacts on the environment. Based on a sample of 361 U.S. firms over the 2007–2016 period, our results show that the number of members in the board was not a factor that helps enhancing environmental performance and transparency. However, the duality of the CEO and chairman roles had a positive impact on environmental performance and transparency. The same result was found for gender diversity among board members and top executives. Furthermore, our results show that younger generations of board members may provide a positive impact on the environmental performance of firms. Finally, the global financial crisis and the level of environmental transparency can impact the corporate governance - environmental performance relationship.

Keywords

• G3