Transparency is Not a Donkey Work: Board Political Orientation and Firm Carbon Disclosure

Firms are increasingly expected to communicate on their climate impacts, as well as the actions they implement to mitigate them. We argue that the political orientation of a firm’s board, because it influences its stakeholders’ expectations as well as the firm’s concerns about meeting them, shapes its disclosure strategy in a somewhat paradoxical way. While liberal orientation may increase the publicity and extensiveness of the carbon disclosure, we expect that it also increases the extent to which firms will attempt to attenuate negative environmental news through more abundant justifications and recourse to obfuscation. Our empirical study, based on a sample of 410 US firms over 8 years, provides evidence for these effects as well as the fact that negative news is penalized by environmental raters, in particular when delivered by a firm with a more liberal orientation, and when justification and obfuscation tactics are employed. These results therefore highlight a complex relationship between board political orientation and environmental transparency.