ABSTRACT We examine how managers’ incentives to minimize litigation risk interact with the unique features of environmental information to shape disclosure decisions. We rely on peer firms’ lawsuits to generate variation in environmental disclosure litigation risk, consistent with prior research and anecdotal evidence suggesting that firms perceive an increase in environmental disclosure litigation risk after a peer firm is sued for related disclosures. Although we provide mixed evidence around changes in total environmental disclosure in response to peer lawsuits, we offer robust evidence that firms provide more forward-looking (and less historical) environmental disclosures in their conference calls in response to peers’ environmental disclosure lawsuits. Our evidence is consistent with firms providing less verifiable disclosures to minimize the risk of being sued for misrepresenting their environmental information. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: K22; M14; M41.

In this study, we examine whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds' investment decisions are sensitive to the existence and extent of firms' voluntary environmental disclosures. We create our measures of voluntary environmental disclosure using bigrams extracted from the Global Reporting Initiative standards. We provide robust evidence that voluntary environmental disclosure in conference calls is associated with greater ESG fund ownership in the subsequent period, incremental to firms' ESG ratings. We also provide evidence that fund managers' reliance on environmental disclosure is concentrated in water, waste, emissions, and compliance disclosures. ESG fund ownership increases with environmental disclosure that is more positive and specific. Our primary finding persists both when we rely on the sustainability report as an alternative proxy for environmental disclosure and when we use fund‐level tests. Overall, our evidence is consistent with ESG funds relying on firms' disclosures when making investing decisions and inconsistent with recent regulatory concerns that ESG fund managers are not following through on their stated investing strategies.