Purpose: In contrast to the reporting, stakeholder and regulatory focus, company-internal issues of carbon accounting have so far rarely been investigated in depth. This case study focuses on carbon accounting, as one aspect of accounting for impacts on the environmental capital and details the...

Companies are increasingly viewed as crucial drivers for timely decarbonization. Current accounting practices for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, however, often leave corporate carbon disclosures and abatement obscured. Here I introduce a taxonomy for assuring the quality of corporate carbon...

Data insufficiency remains a challenge to the mitigation of financial instability from climate-related risks. In response, government authorities around the world have started mandating corporate sustainability disclosure. Still, little is understood about the accuracy of such disclosure. To...

The aim of this paper is to study the emergence of a new occupation globally. From 1999 to 2016, a global occupation of GHG accounting professionals emerged around the globe in all five continents, and both developed and developing countries. The individual GHG accounting professionals who we...

An increasingly widespread accounting practice for electricity (scope 2) emissions, known as the ‘market-based method’, is problematic as it allows companies to use purchased renewable energy attributes (REAs) to report lower emissions, which therefore no longer reflect the actual...

Examining the US Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, I find that facilities reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7.0% after mandatory disclosure of facility-level emissions. A facility's prior GHG inefficiency predicts subsequent GHG emissions reductions, but only after public disclosure occurs,...

This report investigates how large emitters in the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) are accounting for emission allowances. The research involved a detailed survey of the financial statements of the largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters in the EU ETS (26 companies). This was...

An influential emerging literature, led by Bolton and Kacperczyk (2021a), documents strong correlations between unscaled raw emissions and both stock returns and operating performance. We re-examine that data, using a sample of 2,729 U.S. firms from 2005-2019, and conclude that the associations...

We investigate alternative hypotheses for a company's choice for an intensity-only (carbon emissions relative to sales, production, etc.) versus an absolute carbon emissions goal. The hypotheses include: (1) a high growth firm hypothesis whereby high growth companies select an intensity goal, to...