Sample selection We selected companies that were included in the 2009 CDP country reports (English version), which are available on the CDP web site. We chose only 2009 CDP reports because this was the most recent report when we started the project and these firms had relatively well-developed responses to the questionnaire[15]. The initial sample consisted of 2,737 companies from 15 countries[16]. We deleted 26 observations that had duplicate reports or were from companies that had been delisted from the stock exchange[17].In addition, 666 companies without complete financial data in the DataStream were eliminated. The final sample includes 2,045 firms that meet all of these selection criteria (Table I).