Responsible Blockholders and Corporate ESG Disclosure

We study how responsible blockholders influence corporate ESG disclosure. We find that responsible blockholders enhances firm-level ESG disclosure quality or transparency in the United States. We also find that responsible blockholders play external monitoring roles when public visibility is insufficient and that their influence is more pronounced in firms with high information asymmetry. Moreover, we find that responsible blockholders promote for more ESG disclosure where executive compensation is linked to ESG performance. We address endogeneity concerns using instrumental variable regression and Difference -in-Differences techniques and obtained consistent results. Our results also survive a battery of robustness tests and have clear policy implications. We contribute to the literature on ESG voluntary and our findings are consistent with Cohen et al. (2023)