Authors:

  • George Serafeim

Excerpt

2023, Paper: "In this paper, we examine how the development of voluntary sustainability standards has affected the nature of information covered in conference calls. Using industryspecific dictionaries of sustainability terms contained in the disclosure standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), we find a significant increase in companies’ coverage of sustainability topics associated with the development of the SASB standards, particularly for entities that had little or no coverage of sustainability issues historically. This trend begins around the time when SASB released a provisional disclosure standard for a given company’s industry and continues in the years after. We also find a stronger impact of SASB standards on conference call content for firms operating in industries with greater ex-ante uncertainty about which sustainability topics are more likely to be financially material. Overall, our paper provides timely evidence as jurisdictions around the world consider whether to support sustainability reporting in their capital markets and, if so, how."