The Roles of Ownership Structure on Carbon Emission Disclosure Quality of the Listed Oil and Gas Companies in Nigeria

This study investigates how and the extent to which different forms of ownership (foreign, managerial, diluted, concentrated and institutional) influences carbon emission disclosure quality as shown in the levels of the voluntary carbon emission related disclosures in the stand-alone sustainability report of the listed oil and gas companies in Nigeria. Hence, we complement the three leading streams of research on the determinants of carbon emission disclosure quality. We analyzed the research objective using data from the 22 listed oil and gas companies in Nigeria since they are the dominant greenhouse gas emitters globally and show higher commitment to pursuing companies and industrial actions in communicating environmental related information with the external stakeholders, that may reflect attitudinal changes and product sensitive innovations to reducing emission of carbon, carbon management, and targets. Using an ordered logistic regression analysis, we found several important results. First, the findings revealed that firms with greater proportion of foreign ownership exhibit higher carbon emissions disclosure quality, which suggest that the type of ownership correspond with firm’s proactiveness and commitment to environmental practices in the selected companies. Second, institutional ownership in negatively correlated with carbon emission disclosure quality, providing an implication that when institutions invest heavily in a company, they favor weak carbon related disclosure because it enables them to exploit minority shareholders. Third, we observed a negative correlation between ownership concentration and carbon emission disclosure, which indicates that controlling shareholders in form of institutional ownership may be prone to monopolizing carbon emission information to maintain superiority in monitoring and decision-making process.