Climate-related performance and stock price crash risk

Abstract

We examine how environmental performance affects future stock price crash risk. Previous literature shows that legitimacy threats, stemming from environmental risk, lead firms to be particularly sensitive about environmental disclosure and performance. However, we hypothesise and find that under specific conditions, relating to lower operating performance, firms that have higher environmental performance also have higher future stock price crash risk. Further analysis shows that such firms may also have lower readability and more confident tone in their 10-K annual reports. We attribute these findings to impression management utilising environmental performance along with disclosure misdirection practices, where managers of firms with negative news, attempt in some cases to draw the attention of the users of financial reports by obfuscating annual reports for bad news hoarding purposes. Even though in the current year such practices may have a negative effect for stock price crash risk, future stock price crash risk increases due to the dissemination of the negative news in the market. Overall, our results show that environmental disclosure may be used, under certain conditions, as a tool for impression management, which along with financial reporting distraction practices, leads to higher future stock price crash risk.