Celebrating Success: Dr Aly Salama & Dr Marwa Elnahas

Congratulations to Dr Aly Salama & Dr Marwa Elnahas on their recent paper acceptance to “Business Strategy and the Environment”.

Paper title: The Effect of Carbon Dissemination on Cost of Equity

Abstract: This study examines whether firms can influence their cost of equity (COE) by broadly disseminating their carbon information over Twitter. We study firms’ dissemination decisions of carbon information by developing a comprehensive measure of carbon information that a firm makes on Twitter, referred to as iCarbon. Using a sample of 1,737 firm-year observations for 584 non-financial firms with a Twitter account and listed on the US NASDAQ stock exchange over the period 2009-2015, we find that iCarbon is significantly and negatively associated with COE. Our results are consistent after determining the effect of Bloomberg’s environmental (ENV) and environmental-social-governance (ESG) disclosure. The findings also hold when using alternative measures of COE and iCarbon.

Keywords: Dissemination; Carbon emissions; Climate change; Cost of equity; Legitimacy theory; Twitter