Research On Determinants Of Voluntary Carbon Assurance

In recent years,climate change has attracted global attention.As the main emitters of greenhouse gases,enterprises have gained close attention from stakeholders.In order to supervise the carbon emissions,many countries have issued relevant regulations and standards,and gradually established emission trading schemes.Investors,creditors are also concerned about the information of carbon emissions,and they will take full account of the environmental performance of enterprises in the decisionmaking process.Then,more and more enterprises realize the importance of enhancing the reliability of carbon information through external carbon assurance.Enterprises' decision on carbon audit is affected by many factors,and recognizing those factors can help policy makers to issue appropriate regulations.Under the guidance of legitimacy theory,signal theory,stakeholder theory,principal-agent theory and information asymmetry theory,this paper takes the companies responding to CDP questionnaire in the United States from 2010 to 2017 as samples and uses empirical research method to analyze the determinants of voluntary carbon assurance.Innovatively,this paper introduces two variables on corporate governance: the CEO duality and the CSR committee,to identify whether they will affect corporates' decision about external carbon assurance.Empirical results show that firms that expose to higher carbon risk,with higher carbon disclosure score,with carbon reduction incentives,with separation of CEO and board chairman,or with CSR committees tend to obtain external carbon assurance.This shows that carbon risk exposure,carbon governance and corporate governance have significant impact on strategic decision about carbon assurance.Due to higher availability of carbon data in the United States,this paper takes American companies as an example to study.But The conclusions can also provide guidance for practice of carbon assurance in China.