Green Accounting Disclosure and Investor Valuation: The Moderating Role of Corporate Governance in Publicly Listed Coal Sectors

Abstract

This article examines whether green accounting disclosure is associated with investor valuation in publicly listed coal-sector companies and whether corporate governance strengthens that relationship. Coal companies face a distinctive valuation problem: environmental information may help investors assess future liabilities, transition exposure, operating resilience, and management credibility, yet disclosure can also reveal costly environmental impacts and expose inconsistencies between stated commitments and actual performance. Building on agency, stakeholder, legitimacy, signaling, and voluntary-disclosure perspectives, the article develops a framework that separates the breadth of environmental disclosure from its quality, financial materiality, and verification. Corporate governance is conceptualized through board independence and expertise, audit committee effectiveness, ownership oversight, and the integration of climate risk into board-level risk management. A structured synthesis of recent empirical literature and official reporting frameworks is combined with a replicable panel-data design for listed coal companies. The synthesis indicates that disclosure is unlikely to produce a uniform valuation premium: investors are more likely to respond positively when information is comparable, decision-useful, credible, and linked to financial exposure, while high emissions or weak environmental performance may still be priced negatively. Effective governance can strengthen credibility and reduce managerial discretion over selective reporting, but formal governance structures alone may not ensure substantive oversight. Because no original company-year dataset is estimated in this manuscript, it does not invent coefficients or claim new causal findings. Instead, it identifies testable hypotheses, operational measures, econometric specifications, and robustness checks for an empirical study of publicly listed coal companies, with particular relevance to emerging markets such as Indonesia.