Corporate Governance and the Integrity of Corporate Climate Claims: Evidence from the Voluntary Carbon Market

This thesis examines how European listed firms that participate in the voluntary carbon market use and communicate carbon credits, and whether the internal governance of the board is reflected in the way they substantiate their climate claims. The credibility of such claims is shaped less by formal rules than by managerial discretion: no dedicated accounting standard governs the recognition and presentation of carbon credits, and the way a firm frames its claim, validates its target and presents its emissions is chosen within the firm. Through manual content analysis of corporate disclosures, it constructs a transparent, disclosure-based operationalisation of claim integrity risk from three observable features: the framing of the claim as offsetting or contribution, the external validation of the target, and the gross or net presentation of emissions. The framework is applied to a cross-section of 332 European listed firms identified as participants in the voluntary carbon market, and used first to map how they frame and substantiate their claims. Three patterns emerge: participation translates into a corporate climate claim for only a minority of firms (68 of 332); among those, offsetting claims outnumber the more cautious contribution claims by more than three to one (52 against 16); and the configurations differ mainly in relation to sectoral and institutional context. The association between board characteristics and claim integrity is then examined as an exploratory question; because integrity is observable only where a firm makes a claim, it is estimated in stages, and no board characteristic shows a detectable association with the decision to make a claim or, among claimant firms, with claim type or target validation. The contribution is primarily methodological and descriptive: a transparent, disclosure-based coding framework for claim integrity, and a map of where the gap between claim and substance is widest.