Public health, air pollution and corporate sustainability: Evidence from the Spanish 2018 ESG Reporting Mandate

This project examines whether a corporate sustainability reporting mandate led to measurable reductions in corporate pollution—particularly NO₂ and particulate emissions—and whether such environmental improvements translated into measurable public health gains. Through Royal Decree 11/2018, Spain required eligible firms to collect, measure, and publicly disclose previously unavailable ESG information. By increasing transparency and accountability regarding environmental performance, the regulation may have incentivized firms to improve emissions management and reduce local pollution.
More concretely, the project combines multiple data sources to pursue three main objectives: (a) leverage geolocated pollution data to identify the causal impact of the ESG disclosure mandate on local air quality (NO2 emissions) around corporate facilities; (b) exploit the population of corporate sustainability reports to examine heterogeneous effects, assessing how differences in reporting quality translate into different pollution outcomes; and (c) evaluate whether reductions in local pollution levels lead to changes in inpatient hospitalizations for respiratory conditions, using administrative healthcare data from the Spanish Ministry of Health.
Overall, the project addresses one of today’s most pressing public health threats: air pollution, responsible for millions of premature deaths globally. By linking corporate disclosure regulation to both environmental and health outcomes, the findings will provide timely evidence on the broader economic externalities of reporting mandates, directly informing recent pan-European regulatory efforts in corporate sustainability reporting.