Mark Zakota Directory Page

Mark Zakota
Assistant Professor
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Mark Zakota, Assistant Professor of Accounting and Information Assurance, holds a PhD from the University of Florida's Warrington College of Business. His dissertation, titled "EPA Scrutiny and Voluntary Environmental Disclosures," reflects his focus on corporate disclosures and regulatory issues. Prior to his PhD, Zakota studied international business and politics at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research explores disclosures, standard setting, and ESG through the use of natural language processing, machine learning, and XBRL.
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Academic Publications
EPA Scrutiny and Voluntary Environmental Disclosures
Review of Accounting Studies
Market participants have called on the SEC to address the lack of disclosures about firms’ environmental impacts, investments, and exposures. However, the frictions that obstruct the flow of environmental information are not well understood. I shed light on these frictions by examining whether scrutiny by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) restricts the firm’s voluntary environmental disclosures in earnings conference calls. Consistent with the notion that EPA scrutiny gives rise to disclosure frictions, I find a negative relation between EPA scrutiny and the environmental disclosures of scrutinized firms. This negative relation is concentrated among firms without environmental expert directors, suggesting that environmental governance mitigates the chilling effect of EPA scrutiny. In terms of disclosure quality, I show that environmental disclosures include fewer quantitative details under EPA scrutiny. Collectively, these findings provide insights into the frictions that restrict the flow of environmental information to market participants, an important issue given the SEC’s efforts to improve current disclosure practices.
Mark Zakota, Assistant Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland