With the problems of climate warming and ecological destruction becoming more and more serious, natural risks have attracted more and more attention, and corporate natural resource disclosure has gradually become a focal topic in academia. Therefore, based on the institutional theory and the upper echelon theory, this study selects 348 Chinese natural resource-based listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2014 to 2021 as samples to investigate the influence of clan culture on corporate natural resource disclosure and the moderating effect of natural resource endowment on the relationship between the two, and analyzes the heterogeneity from the two aspects of the workplace and growth experience of corporate executives.The results indicate that clan culture has a significant positive effect on corporate natural resource disclosure. Natural resource endowment can negatively moderate the effect of clan culture on corporate natural resource disclosure. The positive effect of clan culture on the quality of corporate natural resource disclosure is significant when executives work in their birthplace or are born before the Cultural Revolution, but it is not significant when executives do not work in their birthplace or are born after the Cultural Revolution. Heterogeneity studies indicate that there are significant differences in the impact of clan culture on corporate natural resource information disclosure in different contexts. The results of grouped regression indicate that clan culture has a stronger influence on corporate executives working in their place of birth.
The incremental contribution of this article is reflected in three aspects. Firstly, in-depth exploration of the incentive factors for natural resource information disclosure by Chinese enterprises can enrich and expand the research content of natural resource information disclosure; Secondly, it enriches and supplements relevant research in the field of the upper echelon theory from a cultural perspective. Thirdly, it expands the research scope of interdisciplinary fields such as culture, finance, and accounting. The interdisciplinary integration has been a research hotspot in the field of accounting in recent years. The research results contribute to a deeper exploration of the motivations for enterprises to disclose natural resource information, enriching and supplementing the high-order echelon theory from a cultural perspective, expanding the analysis of the impact of informal institutions on information disclosure, and providing reference for the study of natural resource information disclosure and informal institutions in developing countries.
（First author: Yongjun Tang is an associate professor at Business School of Hohai University）
The original title of the article is Does clay culture promote corporate natural resource disclosure: Evidence from Chinese natural resource based listed companies, which was published online on September 9, 2023 in the Journal of Business Ethics (one of the FT50 journals, SSCI journal), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05515-9.
