Firms are under increasing pressure from stakeholders both to disclose information about their impacts on sustainability issues and to create targets for improvement on these issues. Principles of ethical and reliable reporting require firms to maintain consistency in their reporting over time, and stakeholders often assess firms based upon targets they set, but we know little about the degree to which firms maintain targets once they are set. We focus on greenhouse gas emission targets in a sample of S&P 500 firms over more than a decade. These targets are of great societal importance and are also relatively easy for firms to alter. We refer to material yet unaccounted for changes in these targets as temporal inconsistency and hypothesize that such inconsistencies are highly prevalent. We also expect a greater incidence of temporal inconsistency in sectors that are more carbon dependent, and that inconsistency is negatively associated with achieving targets. Finally, we outline several patterns of temporal inconsistency and document their frequency in our sample.
Avidan et al. (Mon,) studied this question.