IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/awi/wpaper/0524.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

On the Obligation to Provide Environmental Information in the 21st Century – Empirical Evidence from Germany

Author

Listed:
  • Massier, Philipp
  • Römer, Daniel

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of environmental information disclosure as a regulatory instrument. In particular we analyze its impact when environmental regulation is already advanced. Using German stock market data, we are able to identify the impact of the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER) on the market value of listed firms using a Multivariate Regression Model (MVRM). First, we show that the publication of EPER data leads to negative abnormal returns of the respective listed firms in Germany. Second, we study drivers of these abnormal returns. Here, we find that the firms' individual level of non-carbon emissions can explain the observed changes in market valuation, while carbon dioxide emissions do not seem to be punished by the market. Moreover, we include information on voluntarily provided environmental reports and find that these reports can serve as a substitute to the obligatory register.

Suggested Citation

  • Massier, Philipp & Römer, Daniel, 2012. "On the Obligation to Provide Environmental Information in the 21st Century – Empirical Evidence from Germany," Working Papers 0524, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:awi:wpaper:0524
    Note: This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-opus-131697
    File Function: Frontdoor page on HeiDOK
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/13169/1/Massier_Roemer_2012_dp524.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Konar, Shameek & Cohen, Mark A., 1997. "Information As Regulation: The Effect of Community Right to Know Laws on Toxic Emissions," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 32(1), pages 109-124, January.
    2. Blackman, Allen & Afsah, Shakeb & Ratunanda, Damayanti, 2000. "How Do Public Disclosure Pollution Control Programs Work? Evidence from Indonesia," Discussion Papers dp-00-44, Resources For the Future.
    3. Tom Tietenberg, 1998. "Disclosure Strategies for Pollution Control," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 11(3), pages 587-602, April.
    4. Khanna, Madhu & Quimio, Wilma Rose H. & Bojilova, Dora, 1998. "Toxics Release Information: A Policy Tool for Environmental Protection," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 243-266, November.
    5. Brown, Stephen J. & Warner, Jerold B., 1980. "Measuring security price performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 205-258, September.
    6. Lanoie, Paul & Laplante, Benoit & Roy, Maite, 1998. "Can capital markets create incentives for pollution control?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 31-41, July.
    7. Hamilton James T., 1995. "Pollution as News: Media and Stock Market Reactions to the Toxics Release Inventory Data," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 98-113, January.
    8. Akira Hibiki & Shunsuke Managi, 2010. "Environmental Information Provision, Market Valuation, and Firm Incentives: An Empirical Study of the Japanese PRTR System," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 86(2), pages 382-393.
    9. Cañón-de-Francia, Joaquín & Garcés-Ayerbe, Concepción & Ramírez-Alesón, Marisa, 2008. "Analysis of the effectiveness of the first European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER)," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 83-92, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    information disclosure; EPER; event study; environmental reports;

    JEL classification:

    • L51 - Industrial Organization - - Regulation and Industrial Policy - - - Economics of Regulation
    • Q52 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Pollution Control Adoption and Costs; Distributional Effects; Employment Effects
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:awi:wpaper:0524. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Gabi Rauscher). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/awheide.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.