Download or read book Three Essays in Corporate Environmental Performance written by Shameek Konar and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Environmental Disclosures and Environmental Performance written by Hani Tadros and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The objective of this dissertation is to study the incentives of firms to disclose their environmental information and examine the reliability of the information disclosed. To achieve this objective, there is a need to first understand what constitutes environmental disclosures. The first essay, a review of prior disclosure studies, provides a classification of the different types of environmental disclosures and a synopsis about the motivation to disclose each type of information, the reliability and the relevance of the information disclosed to different stakeholders. The outcome of this research shows that many types of environmental information are relevant to the financial and non-financial stakeholders; however, there are still other types of information that needs to be researched to finally achieve a comprehensive framework of environmental disclosures. The second essay examines the association between environmental disclosures and firms’ environmental performances. The study provides a framework to explain the disclosure process demonstrating the effect of economic and legitimacy factors, environmental performance, and the media communicating these disclosures on the amount and type of information reported. The results suggest that environmental reporting is biased; where firms with higher levels of environmental performance disclose more voluntary information while firms with low-environmental performance tend to meet the mandatory disclosure requirements. There is little evidence to suggest that firms with low-environmental performances use their environmental disclosures to maintain the legitimacy of their environmental operations. The third essay examines the reliability of environmental performance indicators disclosed. The results suggest that the reporting of firms’ EPIs might be free of bias as the study finds no association between the information disclosed and firms’ environmental performance. In general, the dissertation provides assurances over the reliability of environmental information disclosed. There is no denial that firms are subject to pressures from non-financial stakeholders to justify the impact of their operations on the environment. This dissertation shows that firms attempt to use their environmental disclosures to mitigate the effects of these pressures; however, it also suggests that the need to legitimize their operations is not the main driver behind the reporting of environmental information.

Download or read book Hazardous Waste Matters written by Timothy Taylor Greene and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Stakeholder Perspectives on Accounting Information written by Michelle Rodrigue (Professeure d'université) and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through their use of resources, their investments and their output, corporations have a significant impact on our natural environment. In that regard, the long term sustainability of the current business model is currently attracting widespread attention. However, corporations have access to several environmental management tools at both the technical and managerial levels. The challenge is to integrate and implement these tools in their business activities to improve corporate environmental performance. Among these tools, accounting plays a critical role in the environmental management of organizations as it directly relates to the measurement and disclosure of corporate environmental performance. The purpose of this dissertation, which comprises three essays, is to study the role of stakeholders in the environmental accounting-related issues of environmental investment, performance measurement and disclosure. The first essay focuses on environmental resource allocation decisions and specifically examines the influence of corporate governance over the intensity of environmental capital expenditures. Results show that governance mechanisms dedicated to stakeholder accountability and environmental protection increase the intensity of environmental capital expenditures. The second essay concentrates on environmental performance measurement by investigating the role played by stakeholders in the selection of internal environmental performance indicators. Results suggests that stakeholder influences over internal environmental performance metrics are organized along a continuum ranging from narrow unidirectional influence to broad interactive influence necessitating environmental benchmarking. The last essay shifts the attention toward voluntary environmental reporting. More specifically, I contrast corporate and non-corporate (stakeholder) environmental disclosure, focusing on a single organization and its critical stakeholders. Results from the analysis of these environmental reporting dynamics show that different disclosure patterns arise among the perspectives, ranging from uniformity to performance-neutral and performance-biased gaps between the case firm's and stakeholders' disclosures. Overall, these results lead to the conclusion that stakeholders influence environmental accounting, but the form and extent of their influence depends upon the nature of the stakeholder group and the environmental issue at stake. As a whole, by bringing nuances into the portrayal of stakeholder influences, the dissertation enhances our knowledge of firms-stakeholders interactions with respect to environmental accounting.

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Environmental Governance Involvement and Leadership written by Yuhao Ba and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Corporate Sustainability and the Role of the Consumer written by Jeffrey M. Gauthier and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The challenge of sustainability has become an increasingly important concern for organizations. Sustainability raises new questions of legitimacy for organizations, compelling them to address stakeholder expectations of economic, environmental, and social performance. Although consumer stakeholders act as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy for many firms, we know little about how consumers may influence corporate sustainability. This dissertation consists of three essays that examine the role of consumers in influencing corporate sustainability. The first essay examines how companies may attempt to manage sustainability ratings assigned by ratings agencies in an attempt to retain consumer stakeholder support. I argue that an understanding of cognitive choice models helps to reveal conditions under which firms may pursue improvements in sustainability performance in non-core practices rather than in core practices. The second essay is a quantitative analysis of corporate social performance in theU.S.insurance industry. With arguments grounded in the stakeholder salience framework of stakeholder theory, I argue that a firm's proximity to end-consumers will be related to specific dimensions of corporate social performance (community and diversity performance). Results of the study indicate that closer proximity to end-consumers (i.e., a greater percentage of revenues from end-consumers as opposed to businesses) is associated with stronger community and diversity performance. The third essay is a discourse analysis that examines how discourse is used to maintain legitimacy when consumer stakeholders' legitimacy concerns pose a threat to the firm's legitimacy. Drawing on rhetorical analysis and critical discourse analysis, I identify three themes (social, environmental, and economic) and three rhetorical justifications (ethos, logos, and pathos) in texts produced by Monsanto. I offer potential explanations for the relative frequency of themes and rhetorical justifications, and further identify taken-for-granted assumptions in Monsanto's texts. Taken together, these essays suggest that consumer stakeholders hold a significant role in influencing firms' actions, as well as the communication of those actions, regarding sustainability. More broadly, this dissertation reveals the insights that may be gained by foregrounding consumer stakeholders in management research.

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility CSR written by Ruoke Yang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My findings point to a world in which the ratings business is primarily catering to a large group of trusting investors who buy ratings not for the value of information but for the value of institutional certification. The third essay examines the ratings of a recently emerged rating agency competitor and find its ratings are of no better predictive quality. I introduce a novel set of measures, `corporate badness (CB) ratings', for corporate environmental and social performance. In contrast to the leading commercial ratings, worse CB ratings correctly predict more future corporate bad behavior out-of-sample. These CB ratings provide a way to study ratings disagreement, which can be used to disentangle greenwashing from the other information contained in the leading commercial CSR ratings.

Download or read book Information Decision making and Corporate Eco efficiency written by Vered H. Doctori Blass and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the third analysis chapter, I evaluate how the eco-efficiency rating of firms is influenced by the types of indicators and rating methodologies used. I demonstrate the application of data envelopment analysis methodology in the context of social responsible investing decisions. I find that rating based on data envelopment analysis is superior to other methodologies in order to ascertain firms' environmental performance allowing the integration of different performance measures. Overall, each of my analysis chapters provides theoretical and practical insights to better understand the relationship of sustainable decision-making and resulting eco-efficiency.

Download or read book Three Essays in Business Management the Natural Environment and Environmental Policy written by Nicholas S. Nairn-Birch and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation prospectus compiles three studies that constitute the current state and direction of my doctoral research. This includes three empirical analyses focusing on business strategy in the context of the natural environment and environmental policy. The first paper examines the relationship between environmental and financial performance. There has been a long-standing debate in the business strategy literature over whether firms can profit from improving their environmental performance. Recent studies suggest beyond compliance performance leads to increased profitability. However, there has been minimal theoretical or empirical examination of how emerging environmental issues, such as climate change, affect competitiveness. This raises important questions about the time horizon over which the environmental-financial performance relationship is evaluated. Furthermore, few studies have examined environmental strategies, such as green supply chain management, that extend beyond traditional organizational boundaries. Building on the resource-based view of the firm and a process-based view of environmental policy issues this study argues that the impact of environmental strategies on financial performance varies according to a short-term versus long-term perspective. This study is also one of the first to directly test the profitability of supply chain environmental strategies. This is achieved by leveraging novel longitudinal environmental impact data for over 1,000 US corporations from 2004 - 2008 to estimate the effect of direct and supply chain emissions on short- and long-term measures of financial performance. The results suggest that proactive environmental strategies to reduce life cycle GHG emissions may only be profitable over a longer time horizon. Taking an exploratory approach, the second essay examines the dimensionality of environmental performance ratings and its relation to market valuation. The emergence of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), has led to the development of a large number of methodologies for rating corporate environmental performance. Increased availability of information potentially generates an abundance of riches upon which to base investment decisions, but also raises issues of commensurability, information overload and confusion. Using data from three leading purveyors of environmental ratings, the study identifies the principle components of environmental performance captured by prominent methodologies. The results suggest that in large part, two distinct factors explain 80% of the variance of the data: the environmental processes and practices implemented by firms, and the environmental outcomes they generate. The study also shows corporate financial performance to be correlated to process measures but not to outcome measures. The third and final essay examines corporate political strategies to confront issues of environmental policy. In 2008, an estimated $3.3 billion was spent on lobbying, the majority of which bankrolled by business, which are mostly perceived as opposing the government at the expense of the public. In this paper, we develop and test hypotheses on how firm performance on a salient political issue influences corporate political strategy. In the context of the recent climate change policy debate in the United States, we hypothesize a U-shaped relationship between greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and two forms of political activity: lobbying and voluntary public disclosure. To test our hypotheses, the study leverages novel data on corporate GHG emissions, lobbying expenses aimed at climate change legislation and disclosure to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Our results suggest that both dirty and clean firms are active in the public policy process, which challenges the popular view that corporate involvement in the environmental policy process is solely adversarial.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental Regulation written by Subhadra Ganguli and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Corporate Social and Environmental Performance written by Chenxing Jing and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book From Green to Gold written by Mark Gleim and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: This dissertation is designed to contribute to our understanding of the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR). In particular, environmental sustainability is examined to better understand its impact on consumers and firm performance. A set of three essays examines the role, and impact, of environmental sustainability from the perspective of consumers. As firms continue to employ environmentally sustainable marketing strategies, ultimately consumers have the final say regarding the effectiveness of such efforts. An examination of CSR research in marketing, as well as other business disciplines, is first presented to better understand the limitations and opportunities that exist. Next, Essay 1 contains a multi-method analysis of the barriers to green consumption to better understand why environmentally friendly products continue to represent only a small portion of total purchases.

Download or read book Beyond Compliance written by Jonathan Christian Borck and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Chapter 1, I examine plants in the pulp and paper industry, many of which went beyond the requirements of a particular water pollution regulation. I model their behavior as a rational response to uncertainty in pollution control and derive their expected responses to regulatory enforcement. I test the implications of the model using panel data regression techniques. I find that regulatory fines have a significant general deterrent effect, even on plants that never violated their regulatory limits.

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility written by Vanessa Cuerel Burbano and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation explores the effect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices on the firm and contributes to an understanding of how CSR practices can contribute to companies' competitive advantage. In Chapter 1, I use three randomized field experiments implemented in online labor marketplaces to provide causal evidence of the effect of CSR on employee outcomes that have been shown to be critical to firm performance: salary requirements and employee performance. Workers were recruited for short-term jobs and I manipulated whether or not they received information about the employer's CSR program. I then observed the payment workers were willing to accept for the job and their performance on the job. Surveys administered at the end of the experiments gauging workers' perceptions about the received CSR information also provide insight into the distinct mechanisms through which CSR affects the different employee outcomes. This paper contributes to an understanding of how CSR adds value to the firm and highlights the role of the employee in explaining this relationship. It also demonstrates how online labor markets can be used as settings for field experimental research in strategic management more broadly. In Chapter 2, we examine pro bono work in the legal services industry. Using a screening model we show that law firms use pro bono engagements to gain information about associates' expected productivity as an equity partner. Using a dataset of the top 200 US law firms in 2010 we demonstrate empirical support for our model's predictions. Our findings thus suggest that the conventional wisdom that CSR practices are used to provide information about the quality of the firm to the employee is backwards; rather, we find that pro bono engagements are used to provide information about the quality of the employee to the firm. In Chapter 3, we explore what drives firms to combine poor environmental performance with communication about positive environmental performance, resulting in "greenwashing". Although some explanation of firm greenwashing has been put forth, a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of firm greenwashing is lacking. Drawing from existing work in management, strategy, sociology and psychology, we propose a comprehensive framework that examines the external (both institutional and market), organizational and individual drivers of greenwashing and then use this framework to develop recommendations for managers, policymakers, and NGOs to decrease greenwashing.

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility CSR of Entrepreneurial Firms written by Yefeng Wang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a broad management concern, it is not only critical to every aspect of modern business practice, but is also deeply incorporated into a company's daily operations via its values, norms, and decision-making process, etc. While there is an ever-increasing number of studies on CSR, many researchers have treated CSR as one single broad construct, its individual dimensions have been largely neglected. This dissertation takes the opportunity to address CSR by focusing on two dimensions: diversity and governance of three different entrepreneurial entities including clean-technology ventures, family firms in the United States and companies operate in emerging markets. In the first essay, I explore the impact of board diversity, female director representation, to be specific, on venture performance in the context of the clean-tech industry. I posit that appointing female board of directors can help clean-tech ventures overcome legitimacy constraints. I also examine the moderating effect of venture size and environmental ideology, such that this impact is stronger for small firms, and it is stronger for clean-tech ventures operating in a high level of environmental ideology state. In the second essay, I investigate how family involvement influences corporate diversity and how does corporate governance mechanism moderate such effect. The results suggest that family involvement decreases the overall corporate diversity, but family firms present more diversity-related concerns than non-family firms. Meanwhile, I suggest that the adoption of dual-class share decreases family firms' overall diversity. My third essay addresses the question of how corporate governance affect environmental information transparency directly and indirectly through seeking external verification, as well as how the legal and business environment moderates these relationships. I find that companies with strong corporate governance mechanisms are more likely to pursue external verification to alleviate traditional agency conflicts in the emerging markets. In addition, strong internal corporate governance leads to high environmental transparency directly and indirectly via seeking external verification. The legal and business environments moderate these relationships. Overall, these three essays in hopes of filling the gaps in the literature and advance the research in the areas of CSR, corporate governance, and entrepreneurship studies.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental Social and Governance written by Pang-Li Chen and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation seeks to deepen our understanding of environmental, social, and governance issues in finance. The first essay relates to the "E" component of ESG. It studies the consequences of an environmental reform that aims to make industrial land more redeployable by limiting purchasers' liability for past pollution. Existing research shows that strengthening liability for shareholders and creditors lessens their incentives to monitor the polluting firm, leading to worse environmental outcomes. Unlike shareholders and creditors, purchasers do not possess such "monitoring technology." However, purchaser liability can significantly affect corporate environmental activity by influencing the industrial land market. Thus, I investigate how purchaser liability influences industrial firms' pollution behavior in this essay. A fundamental concept in finance known as risk shifting suggests that companies engage in harm-shifting behavior when limited liability is more likely to bind. This means an inherent moral hazard problem is associated with financially distressed: distressed firms underinvest in pollution abatement because they are not responsible for the full cost of cleaning up environmental contamination. I conjecture that strengthening liability protection for purchasers mitigates this moral hazard problem by increasing the liquidity of industrial land. I empirically test this prediction using a difference-in-difference empirical design and detailed plant-level data. Consistent with this conjecture, I show that stronger liability protection for purchasers comes with substantial benefits of facilitating the trades of industrial land. Moreover, firms reduced pollution at treated plants following the reform. Importantly, the reduction is driven by financially distressed firms. My findings highlight a novel environmental benefit associated with reducing purchaser liability. The second essay studies the incentives of people that enforce environmental regulation. In particular, we explore how the government's incentive scheme impacts regulatory risk and pollution choices by regulated plants. We hypothesize that higher pay gaps between EPA attorneys and their superiors increase the monetary value of a promotion, which stimulates them to put more effort into enforcement activities. We test this prediction using a novel dataset on human resource data of all EPA attorneys between 1996 and 2016. We find that higher pay gaps among EPA attorneys increase the quantity and quality of enforcement cases. Moreover, we show that polluting firms respond to this heightened regulatory risk by reducing pollution and production. This paper highlights the cost and benefits of using the government's pay scheme to incentivize environmental regulators. The final essay relates to the "G" component of ESG. I show that boards rely on heuristics (i.e., rules-of-thumb) to allocate their monitoring efforts across their directorship firms. Classic theory on CEO turnover predicts that CEOs are more likely to be fired for performance when the board monitors the firm more intensely. Consistent with this prediction, I find that CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is positively associated with the fraction of directors for whom the current firm is the worst performer among their directorship firms. I argue this finding is consistent with boards using rank-dependent heuristics to allocate their monitoring effort. To bolster this interpretation, I show that directors are less likely to miss their worst-performing firm's board meetings compared to other directorship firms. Furthermore, the effect on CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is driven by board members responsible for monitoring the CEO, such as those sitting on monitoring committees. Finally, I show that relying on rank-dependent heuristics to allocate monitoring efforts leads to inefficient firing decisions. Overall, this essay documents an unknown cost of board interlock: firms that perform poorly relative to their director interlocks are subject to inefficient monitoring.

Download or read book See the Good Speak the Good Do the Good written by and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This research provides a descriptive analysis of radical organizational change in the context of corporate adoption of sustainability policies. The study consists of three essays which focus on three different aspects of change towards sustainability. The first essay uses survey data from 922 senior-level executives and is aimed at understanding how the concept of sustainability is framed by organizations and their managers. By contrasting the practical application of sustainability principles with the varied academic definitions in the literature, this essay provides a further refinement on the theoretical understanding of corporate sustainability. Survey results demonstrate a widespread use of uni-dimensional definitions of sustainability, and there is evidence that size and ownership impact the dimensionality of managers' sustainability definitions. The second essay investigates how organizations determine the content of a change process. In particular, it tests whether the diffusion of a specific environmental practice implementation of environmental management systems is directed by institutional pressures. I argue that change may be suboptimal if the choice of change is driven by these institutional pressures rather than by firm specific contingencies. Therefore, this essay examines one mechanism by which action towards organizational change can fail to attain beneficial results for the organization. The study finds that institutional pressures do impact the adoption of environmental practices; however the direction of impact for mimetic pressures is in the opposite direction of that theorized. These results reveal some interesting differences between mimetic pressures for market versus non-market driven corporate objectives. The final essay analyzes the process and implementation of organizational change toward sustainability. Using a simulation methodology this essay studies how different change sequences impact the duration and performance of a change process. The simulations show that the sequence in which different organizational elements are changed does indeed impact the length of the period of organizational transformation. The results also demonstrate a relationship between sequence and a firm's ability to maintain or recover competencies during a period of transition. With these three essays, my dissertation captures the evolution of organizational change by analyzing; 1 how the need for change is framed, 2 what organizational elements are selected for adaptation, and 3 the order in which these elements are changed.