Eco‐efficiency: GHG reduction related environmental and economic performance. The case of the companies participating in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme

Empirical findings on eco‐efficiency are still inconsistent. Using survey data based on a sample of 283 European carbon‐intensive companies participating in the EU ETS between 2005 and 2012, this article investigates the causal relationships between the corporate environmental strategy focus, proactive GHG reductions and related environmental and economic performance, while taking into account an important contingent factor: the initial state of technology. The study's findings show that eco‐efficiency was generally not obvious among the companies during the first two trading periods. It furthermore indicates that GHG emissions were generally not reduced cost‐effectively, as companies' intrinsic values were more likely to have influenced carbon reduction related decisions to a greater degree than the economic incentives resulting from the market mechanisms of the ETS. The results not only shed light on firm behavior with regard to technology management but also provide insights for policy makers into how to stimulate more cost‐effective environmental investments. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Nonparametric Methods for Evaluating Economic Efficiency and Imperfect Competition

This article unifies and extends ideas from nonparametric production analysis and DEA for testing organizational efficiency. We show how the admissible price set can be restricted to account for prior information on prices. These restrictions may relate prices to input and output quantities in order to test noncompetitive behavior of the evaluated decision making unit. While the resulting efficiency tests cannot always be cast into linear programming problems, we discuss various solution strategies for the tests. Thereby we consider the question when does local optimality of the result guarantee global optimality. We also show how the decision maker's preferences, for example ranking information, can be adopted into DEA models in a simple manner. Finally, the approach with price restrictions is illustrated with an application to test noncompetitive behavior of the pulp and paper industries in Finland.     

Mitigating climate change: A role for regulations and risk‐taking

Why do some firms engage in actions to reduce climate change? We propose two counterintuitive mechanisms: high levels of regulation and a firm's increased tolerance for risk. Drawing from insights on how institutional contexts constrain, and enable, prosocial firm behavior, we argue that external pressures, amplified internally by a firm's higher tolerance for risk, increase the likelihood that a greenhouse gas (GHG)‐intensive firm will engage in climate change actions that exceed regulatory requirements. An analysis based on 7,101 observations of U.S. publicly traded firms during the 2013 to 2015 period supports our hypotheses. Our models show high overall prediction accuracy (88.6%) using an out‐of‐time holdout sample from 2016. Moreover, we find that firms that have exhibited environmental wrongdoing are also more likely to engage in beyond‐compliance activities, which may be a form of greenwashing. Thus, more formal and informal regulatory oversight has the potential to spur positive environmental actions. This has implications for a firm's corporate social responsibility actions as well as for climate change regulatory policy.     

Sustainable development of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises in the European Union: A taxonomy of circular economy practices

This paper focuses on the implementation of circular economy (CE) practices in small‐ and medium‐sized firms in all 28 European Union (EU) countries. The analyses take into account the hierarchical nature of the collected data as firms are nested within EU countries, that is, the heterogeneity between different types of firms and countries according to practices and attitudes towards CE. The multilevel latent class model identifies groups of firms and groups of EU countries that are homogeneous in terms of CE, that is, how the homogeneous groups of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) are distributed across the groups of EU countries. These results, together with the fact that firms with similar CE attitudes and practices have different demographic and business profiles across groups of countries, shed further light on the topic of green behavior in the EU with implications for businesses' environmental policies. Moreover, indications emerge that European policies favoring the implementation of CE practices should be targeted at least for subgroups of European countries, considering the different composition by typology of SMEs operating in their territories and that, at the same time, policies should be defined within each group of countries to account for the specific features of each of the four classes of SMEs.     

It is merely a matter of time: A meta‐analysis of the causality between environmental performance and financial performance

Research on the relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and financial performance (CFP) continuously receives high attention in both general media and academic publications. One central issue concerns the causal effects between the two constructs. Because existing primary literature is characterized by its heterogeneous study designs and mixed empirical evidence, the aim of this paper is to explicitly shed light on the causality effects between CEP and CFP by means of a meta‐analysis of 893 empirical estimates from 142 CEP–CFP studies. Our findings suggest that in the short run (1 year), financial resources can increase a firm's environmental performance as proposed by the slack resources hypothesis; however, the effects disappear in the long run (after more than 1 year). Conversely, increasing environmental performance has no short‐term effect on a corporate financial performance, whereas a firm significantly benefits in the long term, which is in accordance with the Porter hypothesis. Overall, our results show that the causality between environmental performance and financial performance depends on the time horizon.     

An analysis of environmental sustainability in small & medium‐sized enterprises: Patterns and trends

One of the greatest challenges facing the world today is climate change. The need to consistently advance with environmentally sustainable practices in today's businesses is crucial, and businesses are demanded to be more environmentally sustainable every day. This study conducts an analysis of the literature on small and medium‐sized enterprises' (SMEs) environmental sustainability by carefully examining 122 studies from 58 journals published from 2013 to 2019. We investigate the trends in drivers and barriers of sustainability adoption to inform both SMEs managers and policymakers. Our results also classify the reviewed studies on the basis of their methodologies and show the distribution of studies across industry sectors and locations in order to set directions for future research on sustainability practices of SMEs.     

Corporate Responsibility Reporting and its Determinants in Comparative Perspective – a Review of the Empirical Literature and a Meta‐analysis

For four decades, reporting on corporate responsibility by businesses has been the subject of empirical research. In the 1970s and 1980s, studies mostly originated from Anglo‐Saxon and Western European countries. During the last two decades research on responsibility reporting was increasingly undertaken in emerging and developing countries as well – always following the reporting practices of the respective businesses. Consequentially, a very large number of studies exist today. Many of these have empirically investigated the determinants of responsibility reporting and examined whether internal factors like size and industry or external factors like stakeholder pressures have an impact on disclosure. Thus, the purpose of the following paper is twofold. First, it seeks to provide an overview of the existing literature in order to facilitate further research. Overall, 186 studies have been examined for the determinants which they considered and have been grouped according to their geographical origin. This provides for an analysis of whether academics from different regions have taken different approaches to the empirical examination of responsibility reporting and if their results differed. The findings show that scholars across regions have taken different paths in empirical research, but indications for a variation in the impact of specific determinants on reporting are weak. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Bouncing Back from Extreme Weather Events: Some Preliminary Findings on Resilience Barriers Facing Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises

Extreme weather events (EWEs) pose unprecedented threats to modern societies and represent a much‐debated issue strongly interlinked with current development policies. Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), which constitute a driving force of economic growth, employment and total value added, remain highly vulnerable to and ill prepared for such environmental perturbations. This study investigates barriers to SMEs’ resilience to EWEs in an attempt to shed light on enabling factors that can define effective organizational responses to non‐linear environmental stimuli. Relying on structural equation modeling and data gathered from 109 SMEs that recently experienced EWE impacts, we link the general concept of SMEs’ resilience barriers to EWEs with a series of elements to determine specific internal and external factors that contribute the most to EWE resilience. In particular, external barriers of institutional conditions and mechanisms of support and guidance as well as internal barriers of resources and managerial perceptions are found to be the most critical ones in determining resilience. The assessment offers essential research evidence for practitioners on SME management and sets forth linkages with current mechanisms for policy interventions towards an appropriate resilience agenda for SMEs. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Planning Discourse versus Land Discourse: The 2009–12 Reforms in Land‐Use Planning Policy and Land Policy in Israel

Land policy and land‐use planning policy are two types of public policy pertaining to space. In general, land‐use planning policy deals with land‐use allocation and property rights, whereas land policy defines the land regime of a society. These differences have shaped a unique discourse for each of these policy types. The purpose of this article is to examine the differences and similarities between the land discourse and the planning discourse by analyzing two public campaigns conducted in Israel against two proposed reforms: the 2009 reform of the Israel Land Administration and the 2010–12 reform of the Planning and Building Law. The findings reveal substantive differences between the two campaigns, manifested in the nature of the leading players, the types of public activities they chose, and most notably in the discourses and the hierarchy of considerations they addressed. The findings raise profound questions regarding universal trends in spatial policy reforms; their influence on the activities of public coalitions and the discourses they adopted; possible future effects of these trends on the differences between the land discourse and the planning discourse; and the impact of these trends on the ability of groups and individuals elsewhere to influence spatial policies (such as planning and land policies).