Frank Schiemann

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg

The paper focusses on the reporting of climate change-related physical risks. Drawing on data from the CDP questionnaire for 717 European companies over three years (2011–13) we find that information asymmetry is generally smaller when firms report about their physical risks. Furthermore, we find that reporting of a higher exposure to physical risk...

Organizational performance (OP) is a central construct in strategic management research. While previous studies established the multidimensionality of OP, relationships between OP and its dimensions remain unexplored. It is important to specify these relationships to determine how to measure OP and how to interpret empirical results. We apply confi...

We introduce the decomposition of carbon emissions into an expected and an unexpected component, and analyze the association between these components and firm value. The expected component captures a firm's average carbon emissions inherent to its business model and operating environment. The unexpected component, meaning the firm‐specific deviatio...

We investigate whether an environmental social governance (ESG) disclosure moderates the relation between ESG controversies and analyst forecast accuracy. The previous literature has shown that ESG controversies increase uncertainty about a firm's future prospects, while ESG disclosure decreases this uncertainty. We therefore take the next step and...

The Paris Agreement aims to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the second half of the 21st century, and the Oil & Gas sector plays a key role in achieving this transition. Understanding progress in emission reductions in the private sector relies on the disclosure of corporate climate-related data, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (C...

Materiality is a key principle of corporate reporting. However, with developments toward more sustainability-related disclosure standards and regulations, fundamentally different definitions of and approaches to materiality have emerged among central standard-setting institutions and researchers. The current state of conceptual pluralism gives rise...

Our study examines the market valuation implications of indirect Scope 2 carbon emissions as measured under the two different approaches suggested by the GHG Protocol [i,e, location-based (LB) and market-based (MB)]. Although various studies have examined the value relevance of total carbon emissions, limited attention has been paid to the valuatio...

We examine whether and how mandatory climate reporting leads to changes in firms’ carbon emissions. Drawing on legitimacy theory and using a difference-in-differences design, we assess the effect of the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), introduced by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2010, on the carbon performance defined as car...

We investigate how the selection of assurance topics and the format of their communication influence the credibility perception of sustainability report readers. This is important because misleading communication may discredit ethical sustainability assurance practices. Based on signaling theory and using an experimental approach, we are the first...

We investigate the capital market reactions to the publication of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board’s (SASB) standards on the financial materiality of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. We argue that the SASB’s participatory standard-setting process leads to a classification system that provides a common prioritization...

We analyse whether increased risk reporting by European energy utilities is positively or negatively related to firm value. Using an unsupervised machine learning topic model 'Latent Dirichlet Allocation', we classify the content of the risk reports presented in the notes to the financial statements in different risk topics over the period from 200...

Materiality is an ambiguous concept in sustainability reporting where potential users are more heterogeneous than in financial reporting. Building on decision usefulness and dual process theory, we scrutinize in an experimental setting how two important stakeholder groups react to manipulations of the topic of nonfinancial information while control...

Firms’ decisions to prepare and to publish private information are key issues in disclosure research. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) provides a unique setting that allows us to examine the determinants of these two sequential disclosure decisions, first to respond to the CDP questionnaire and second to publish this response. We apply a sequent...

Although stakeholder theory is widely accepted in environmental disclosure research, empiri-cal evidence about the role of stakeholders in firms’ disclosure is still scarce. We address this issue for a setting of carbon disclosure. Our international sample comprises the CDP Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 350 reports from 2008 to 2011, resulting in a...

Purpose: The capitalisation of intangible investments is discussed controversially in the financial accounting literature. International accounting standards are concerned with this issue and generally demand more intellectual capital to be recognised on the face of the balance sheet. If investors and analysts already gather monetary information ab...

The debate surrounding climate change often centers on companies’ contributions to global warming, which has led to an increase in the importance of carbon disclosure. We evaluate the current state of related research and identify its trends, coherences, and caveats via a systematic literature review. Sociopolitical theories of disclosure, economic...

Employees are an important firm resource and a source of intellectual capital; hence, they drive firm performance. Employee expenses capture information about employees and are one of the largest earnings components. We analyze whether this earnings component contributes incremental information content over and above that of earnings alone. Our res...

Organizational performance is a fundamental construct in strategic management. Recently, researchers proposed a framework for organizational performance that includes three dimensions: accounting returns, growth, and stock market performance. We test the construct validity of indicators of these dimensions by examining reliability, convergent valid...

We analyze firms’ voluntary disclosure of intellectual capital in a setting of presentations to analysts and investors. Firms use presentations to analysts and investors as an additional means of reporting. Due to lesser restrictions of this kind of reporting and also due to the private channel disclosure setting of such presentations, firms are ab...

Externe und interne Anforderungen verlangen von Kapitalgesellschaften ein aussagefähiges Risikocontrolling-Instrumentarium. An Hand eines Praxisbeispiels zeigen die Autoren wie das Risikomanagementsystem eines Beispielunternehmens, der R. STAHL Technologiegruppe, auf Schwachpunkte bei Risikoidentifikation und -beurteilung untersucht wurde, um darau...