How Circular Economy Disclosure Responds to Institutional Determinants Empirical Evidences in Non-Financial European Firms. Sustainability

Despite the increasing attention that circular economy (CE) has received at the international level in recent years, the literature has paid limited attention to the importance of institutional factors that may influence firms' disclosure of CE. Thus, there is a gap in the study of CE disclosure, especially when compared to other literature dedicated to environmental disclosure. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the institutional pressures, in terms of coercive, normative and mimetic factors, that influence firms' behavior with respect to CE disclosure. This research focuses on a sample of 366 non-financial firms, operating in 14 EU countries between 2015 and 2020. The results show that coercive and mimetic institutional pressures positively influence the level of CE dis-closure issued by the firms. With respect to normative pressure, the results are mixed. In fact, only the adoption of GRI is positively and significantly related to CE disclosure. The presence of an external assurance, as well as the commitment to the SDGs, is not significantly related to the CE disclosure. The absence of an analytical standard that organically addresses the issue of CE, by guiding companies in their disclosure, may explain the irrelevance of these factors in the process of con Citation: To be added by editorial staff during production. Academic Editor: Firstname Last-name Received: 2 October 2023 Revised: date Accepted: date Published: date Copyright: © 2023 by the authors. Submitted for possible open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). vergence of the information produced. This research contributes to the CE literature by providing some insights into the determinants of disclosure and the role of institutional pressures in influ-encing the level of CE information. In addition, the research contributes to previous studies on disclosure by measuring the CE information provided by companies with an indicator developed based on specific environmental items collected from the Refinitiv Eikon database, which could be used in future research.