Corporate Digital Responsibility: A Board of Directors May Encourage the Environmentally Responsible Use of Digital Technology and Data: Empirical Evidence from Italian Publicly Listed Companies

This paper presents a framework for our hypotheses that the independence of a board of directors and the use of digital technology might influence the way a corporation performs environmentally. For empirical verification of our thesis, we take a sample of 53 publicly listed Italian companies and look at data on their board composition, greenhouse gas emissions, and expenditures for the use of digital technologies of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) over a period of five years. What emerges from the test partially supports our predictions. In particular, we find that a higher level of board independence is associated with better environmental performance. There is no direct, statistically significant association between the use of digital technologies and environmental performance, so a greater use of digital technologies is not, in itself, sufficient to improve the environmental performance of a firm. However, our empirical analyses find that environmental performance is positively influenced by the use of digital technologies in firms that include a proportionately high number of independent directors on their boards. This research improves our understanding of antecedents of Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), showing how the share of independent directors on a board has a positive impact on CDR, understood here as the set of practices and behaviours that help an organisation use data and digital technologies in ways that are environmentally responsible.