Board centrality and environmental disclosures: Evidence from the polluting Industries in China.

We examine the association between board centrality and corporate environmental disclosure using hand-collected data from Chinese-listed firms in heavily polluting industries. We find that board centrality has a positive effect on corporate environmental disclosure. We also show that this positive effect emanates from the critical role of the board in monitoring and resource distribution, and its incentive to promote information transparency. Our results, which are robust to a set of robustness checks, have important implications for both regulators and investors. • We provide evidence that board centrality influences corporate environmental disclosure. • We find a positive association between board centrality and environmental disclosure using a sample of Chinese firms. • The effect is more pronounced for firms with CEO duality, and those with no directors' and officers' liability insurance. • Our results are robust to alternative estimation methods and proxies for board centrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]