Proprietary costs and the choice of hard and soft greenhouse gas emissions’ disclosure

Abstract We test whether proprietary costs (relating to competition) are associated with disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of companies in annual and stand‐alone sustainability reports. We use the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 disclosure requirement to create a natural experiment to control for endogeneity issues. Disclosure is significantly higher when there are lower proprietary costs from existing rivals and higher proprietary costs from potential new entrants for hard , and soft disclosures.