Towards environmental disclosures: The role of intellectual capital

Abstract The aim of our study is to investigate the impact of intellectual capital (IC) and its components such as human capital, structural capital, and capital employed on the environmental disclosures (ED) of a company. The IC has been measured using value‐added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) and alternate value‐added intellectual coefficient (A_VAIC). The study employs method of moments quantile regression (MM‐QR) approach to examine the heterogeneous effects of ED within firms by extracting relevant data from ProwessIQ and Bloomberg databases. The findings of the study indicate that the relationship between ED and IC is concave implying that IC initially has a significant positive impact on ED but beyond a point, it produces negative impact. Further, it is noticed that IC's impact increases as we move from lower (25th) to higher quantile (75th), indicating that low values of IC have low impact on ED, whereas high values of IC have greater impact on ED. This is the first study to examine the impact of IC on ED. It also adds to the scarce literature on the new statistical technique of method of moments quantile regression.