FIRM'S SPECIFIC ATTRIBUTES AND VOLUNTARY ENVIRONMENTAL DISCLOSURE IN NIGERIA: EVIDENCE FROM LISTED MANUFACTURING COMPANIES

This paper sought to examine the association between firm's specific attributes (firm size, earnings, leverage and governance) and voluntary environmental disclosure with evidence from listed manufacturing companies in Nigeria. To achieve this, data of firm size, earnings, leverage and governance were obtained from the annual reports and accounts of some selected manufacturing companies during 2011-2015. Data collected were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. First, it was revealed that some of the studied manufacturing companies have high leverage profile while some with low leverage profile. In addition, some companies' environmental items were not disclosed in their annual reports and accounts while some were disclosed and described in monetary terms. Second, the normality test for the residuals showed that the hypothesis that the residuals are normally distributed is rejected. Thus, we conducted a robust regression analysis in order to resolve the non-normality nature of the variables and error term in our model. Third, the robust regression result validates all the hypothesis of the study that there is a positive relationship between environmental disclosure, firm size, leverage, earnings per share and governance of the studied manufacturing companies in Nigeria. On the basis of the above, it was recommended among others that governance structure of companies should be reinforced by assigning more independent directors in the board composition.