Proceedings

5 Factors related to the entity’s financial performance (financial performance);
6 Factors related to the entity’s membership in various environmental programs
(PANP membership – carbon emission, the coming out in the Register of the
Romanian Polluters appeared in 2007).
In order to check the existence of these links, I formulate the following assumptions
that I tried to validate through statistical analysis:
H1: The level of environmental reporting for a publicly traded organization from
Romania depends on the entity’s public exposure. In formulating this hypothesis was
started from the following consideration: the more an organization is exposed to the
public (investors, users, media, etc.), the more it would be willing to provide all
possible information on various aspects, including environmental information. This
hypothesis was tested in studies such as those of Brown and Deegan (1998), Patten
(2002) etc. The public exposure of an entity was quantified by turn by three variables:
the section on the Stock Exchange (the organization may be traded on capital markets
BVB or RASDAQ), the category at the Stock Exchange (the organization may be
listed in Category I, II or III) and the sales percentage intended for export (here was
analyzed especially the opening of the organization outdoors).
H2: The size of the entity determines the level of environmental reporting. The size of
the entity, in particular the intensity of the work carried out, would represent, from our
point of view, an essential factor of environmental reporting. Pattern (1991) and
Milne and Hackston (1996), Cormier and Magnan (2003), Cormier et al. (2005),
Belkaoui-Riahi (2001), Watson et al. (2002) are some of the researchers that have
demonstrated over time the correlations between the size of the entity and the level of
environmental reporting. Ahmed and Courtis (1999) found that size, listing status and
financial leverage influence voluntary disclosure. The size of the entity is expressed
by two variables: turnover and the number of employees.
H3: The capital structure determines the level of environmental reporting for the
Romanian entities. Cormier and Gordon (2001) showed that the status of the capital
(public or private) influences environmental reporting. Cormier and Magnan (2003)
showed that the dispersion of the capital (national/foreign) positively affects
environmental reporting in the annual report. The following variables were examined:
the status of the capital (public or private), its dispersion (Romanian or foreign) and
the number of the shareholders.
H4: The level of environmental reporting is closely linked to the environmental
performance for the Romanian entities, environmental performance of an organization
being expressed by three indicators: whether or not appeared press articles related to
the negative environmental performance for a particular entity; whether an entity has
been fined or not by the Environmental Guard for not complying with the related
legislation; environmental performance expressed in financial terms as being equal to
the total number of emissions in the environment related to turnover (we considered
the polluting level reported to the intensity of the work performed). In the study
conducted in 2002, Dennis Patten (2002) demonstrates, using as indicators for
environmental performance the level of emissions in the environment related to the
turnover, the existence of a negative link between the environmental performance and
the level of environmental reporting.
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