Corporate Environmental Responsibility: A Legal Origins Perspective

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• 作者：Hakkon Kim ; Kwangwoo Park ; Doojin Ryu
• 关键词：Legal origins ; Corporate environmental responsibility (CER) ; Managerial ownership
• 刊名：Journal of Business Ethics
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：February 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：140
• 期：3
• 页码：381-402
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Ethics; Business and Management, general; Management; Business Ethics; Quality of Life Research;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-0697
• 卷排序：140

文摘

In this study, we examine the determinants of corporate environmental responsibility (CER), as well as the relationship between legal systems and CER as measured by a unique set of global environmental cost data. Results of our analyses show that firms’ legal origins affect CER, which requires a long-term management perspective. Specifically, our results indicate that civil law firms exhibit significantly higher levels of CER than common law firms. In addition, results of an auxiliary test suggest that manager shareholding has a significant, nonlinear relationship with CER. The association between a firm’s legal origin and its CER performance remains robust after controlling for the effects of managerial ownership and issues related to endogeneity. Our findings imply that although the majority of corporate law studies in the past few decades provide support for the common law system emphasizing the maximization of shareholder value and investor protection, the civil law system stressing the maximization of stakeholder wealth and the importance of CER may become more influential in the coming decades as CER becomes central to firms’ operations.