Purpose: This paper aims to provide insight into how environmental information is reflected in the market value of listed Italian companies. In particular, it investigates the value relevance of voluntary environmental information disclosed by companies and the influence of environmental policies assurance.Design/methodology/approach: The method used is the accounting-based valuation model used by Cormier and Magnan (2007), analogue to the one developed by Ohlson (1995), which considers market value of equity as a function of book value, accounting earnings and environmental indicators as provided by Bloomberg. The analysis in this paper is based on the environmental disclosure score (i.e. proxy of a company’s transparency in reporting environmental information) and the assurance practice (i.e. whether or not the company’s environmental policies were subject to an independent assessment for the reporting period).Findings: Results partially support initial conjectures, i.e. the environmental voluntary disclosure represents value-relevant information positively correlated with firms’ market value. Furthermore, when such information is subject to an independent assessment for the reporting period, an incremental benefit deriving from the assurance of such information cannot be found. This is similar to the findings of Choet al.(2014), i.e. the market perceptions on assurance may need to be developed before the environmental report assurance market in Italy can develop.Research limitations/implications: Limitations are related to the small sample located in a single country, meaning that results may not be generalisable. The implications are that other methods may provide further value, but these may need to be based either on different data or larger samples (i.e. cross-country analysis).Originality/value: The increasing importance of environmental issues for economic decision-making and the presence of ethical investors create incentives for environmental information disclosure, which is becoming increasingly significant for comprehensive firm valuation. However, for this information to serve its role, disclosure must be credible. Hence, there are many companies that resort to voluntary assurance of environmental policies, motivated by a need to demonstrate credibility with external stakeholders. Notwithstanding, the influence of verification practice over environmental disclosure on a low regulation country has not yet been completely explored. This paper aims to fill this gap.

We examine the relation between disaster risk and banks’ loan loss provisions (LLP). We propose a disaster risk measure based on the natural disasters declared as major disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency over a 15-year span. We theoretically support and empirically validate our measure using three different approaches, including the UN Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction, which relates disaster risk to natural hazard exposure, vulnerability and capacity, and hazard characteristics. Using more than 445,000 bank-quarter observations, we document that banks located in U.S. counties with higher disaster risk recognize larger LLP after controlling for other bank-level factors related to LLP. We employ several techniques to ensure the robustness of our findings, including difference-in-differences estimation and matched samples. In additional analysis, we explore the characteristics that better enable banks to recognize disaster risk in their LLP, and investigate the consequences of managing disaster risk through LLP. Our results are important, especially because of the increasing concern about disaster risk and because they inform the growing debate on the economic consequences of disaster risk and the ability of the banking system to proactively manage the resulting credit risk through LLP.