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Natural Disasters, Risk Salience, And Corporate Esg Disclosure, Qiping Huang, Yongjia Li, Meimei Lin, Garrett A. Mcbrayer

Finance Faculty Publications and Presentations

We examine how natural disasters affect the corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure policies of firms located close to disaster areas. We study firms located in counties neighboring those impacted by natural disasters and find that, on average, these firms increase their ESG disclosure transparency over the period subsequent to the disaster. Given that our sample firms are located outside of the area directly impacted by the disaster, the changes in disclosure transparency after the disaster are consistent with managers increasing their preference for transparency as their risk salience increases. Further, we find that firms with a higher percentage …