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The effect of carbon dissemination on cost of equity
Author(s) -
Albarrak Mohammed S.,
Elnahass Marwa,
Salama Aly
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
business strategy and the environment
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.123
H-Index - 105
eISSN - 1099-0836
pISSN - 0964-4733
DOI - 10.1002/bse.2310
Subject(s) - equity (law) , stock exchange , dissemination , corporate social responsibility , business , information dissemination , sample (material) , corporate governance , accounting , stock (firearms) , economics , public economics , finance , public relations , political science , law , mechanical engineering , telecommunications , chemistry , chromatography , world wide web , computer science , engineering
This study examines whether firms can influence their cost of equity (COE) by broadly disseminating their carbon information over Twitter. We study firms' dissemination decisions of carbon information by developing a comprehensive measure of carbon information that a firm makes on Twitter, referred to as iCarbon . Using a sample of 1,737 firm‐year observations for 584 nonfinancial firms with a Twitter account and listed on the U.S. NASDAQ stock exchange over the period 2009–2015, we find that iCarbon is significantly and negatively associated with COE. Our results are consistent after determining the effect of Bloomberg's environmental and environmental, social, and governance disclosure. The findings also hold when using alternative measures of COE and iCarbon .