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Responding to Climate Change Crises: Firms' Trade‐Offs

Journal of Accounting Research 2025 63(5), 2137-2179
We examine firms' trade‐offs in their voluntary disclosure decisions following negative media coverage of climate change incidents. By combining a keyword discovery algorithm and a fine‐tuned BERT model, we identify “hard” and “soft” climate disclosures on Twitter. Our findings indicate that firms tend to issue climate tweets as a rapid response to negative climate incidents. Additionally, firms with a history of hard climate change disclosure, as measured by ESG reports, are more likely to issue climate‐related responses than firms without such a history. Furthermore, we show that prior hard disclosure is associated with hard responses when the incident receives moderate media attention, but with soft responses when the incident receives low media attention. Our findings provide empirical insights for dynamic disclosure theory by illustrating how prior disclosure shapes firms' response strategies to negative media coverage

Sexism, Culture, and Firm Value: Evidence from the Harvey Weinstein Scandal and the #MeToo Movement

Journal of Accounting Research 2024 62(5), 1989-2035 open access
During the revelation of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the reemergence of the #MeToo movement, firms with a nonsexist corporate culture, proxied by having women among the five highest‐paid executives, earn excess returns of 1.3% relative to firms without female top executives. These returns are driven by changes in investor preferences toward firms with a nonsexist culture. Institutional ownership increases in firms with a nonsexist culture after the Weinstein/#MeToo events, particularly for investors with larger holdings and investors with a lower ESG focus ex ante. Firms without female top executives improve gender diversity after these events, particularly in more sexist states and in industries with few women executives. Our evidence attests to the value of having a nonsexist corporate culture and indicates that changes in societal norms toward women are permeating into capital markets and corporations