Hasnan Ahmed, Md. Mohan Uddin, Mofijul Hoq Masum
Corporate environmental disclosure is highly scrutinized both by the stakeholders and the academia due to their greater impact within an economy. Interestingly, many corporations in the emerging countries go for voluntary environmental disclosure even without any mandatory requirement. Recognizing the scant literature explaining such inclination this paper attempts to uncover the underlying factors that may help for future enhancement of the culture of voluntary environmental disclosure. Studying a total of 284 firm-year observations of the years 2010 to 2014 of the publicly listed companies representing all industries of Bangladesh, a linear regression model is operationalized. This study finds that voluntary environmental disclosure varies over the years and across the industries. Moreover, voluntary environmental disclosure is affected by firm size and operating performance. Interestingly, the voluntary environmental disclosure also has a habitual influence since the firms having disclosure in one year tend to disclose more in the next year. This study provides support to the applicability of organizational legitimacy theory and the institutional theory in the context of a developing country with no strict environmental disclosure requirement.