4th ECOFI & CRECC Research Seminar
The ECOFI department and the Center of Research for energy and Climate Change (CRECC) are glad to host, as guest speaker, Dr. Sadok El Ghoul, University of Alberta, Canada.
Board Ancestral Diversity and Voluntary Greenhouse Gas Emission Dsiclosure
Abstract
This paper provides new insights into the determinants of the strategic decision to voluntarily disclose greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – a decision that previous literature has shown to be value enhancing and demanded by stakeholders. We document that board ancestral diversity has a positive and statistically significant effect on a firm’s scope and quality of voluntary GHG emission disclosure. Ancestral diversity is a diversity aspect that is not subsumed by other common diversity measures. Our results are robust to controlling for several other dimensions of board diversity and addressing endogeneity and sample selection. Supplementary analysis suggests that board ancestral diversity has a stronger impact on GHG emission disclosure in complex firms and firms with low institutional ownership. In line with resource dependence, stakeholder, and (stakeholder-)agency theory, we interpret our findings as consistent with the view that board diversity enhances advising and monitoring.
Dr. Sadok El Ghoul is a Professor of Business Administration at Campus Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta, where he teaches finance, international business and econometrics. He received his M.B.A. and Ph.D. from Laval University. His work has been published in finance, management, international business, business ethics and accounting journals such as Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Finance, Management Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, The Accounting Review and Contemporary Accounting Research. Prof. El Ghoul received the McCalla Professorship at the University of Alberta in 2013-2014. He is an associate editor at the Journal of Banking & Finance, a subject editor at Emerging Markets Review, and an editorial board member of several other academic journals. In 2017, he received the Martha Cook Piper Research Prize, which recognizes two University of Alberta faculty members in the early stage of their careers.