Three Essays on Environmental, Social, and Governance Transparency PDF Download

Author: Hendijani Zadeh Mohammad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation is comprised of three essays on determinants and consequences of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Transparency. Transparency refers to high quantity of material and value relevant information about ESG issues. In the first essay, we explore the relationship between our two variables of interest (i.e., audit quality and public media exposure) and ESG transparency on a sample of publicly listed Canadian firms in in the S&P/TSX Index of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Results show that audit quality and public media exposure are two main drivers of ESG transparency, hence, commitment to high quality audits and exposure to high public media coverage drive firms to be more transparent about ESG issues. Finally, as a consequence of ESG transparency, we find a negative association between ESG transparency and firm-level investment inefficiency. The second essay examine whether the transparency of environmental and social (E&S) information affects financial analysts' forecast properties that reflect their information set. Focusing on a sample of non-financial and non-utility U.S. firms from the S&P 500 index, results suggest that the level of transparency vis-à-vis both E&S information is negatively related to analysts' forecast errors as well as forecast dispersion. These negative relationships become more pronounced for firms with low financial reporting quality, low media coverage, and for those with weak governance. Finally, we find that E&S transparency relates with investment efficiency essentially via analysts` information environment, which thus acts as a mediating variable. This finding is consistent with financial analysts also playing a monitoring role in capital markets. The third essay, we investigate how a firm's (E&S) transparency relates with its cash holdings. Focusing on a large sample of S&P 500 firms, results show that a higher level of E&S transparency implies lower firm-level cash holdings. The negative relationship is more pronounced for firms suffering from high information asymmetry, with low financial reporting quality, and for those with weak governance. Further analyses document that the two channels and mechanisms by which E&S transparency affect firm-level cash holdings are the cost of debt and financial constraints. Finally, our findings suggest that E&S transparency increases the market value relevance of an additional dollar in cash holdings.

Author: Pang-Li Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Environmental management
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Author: Yixin Liu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Public administration
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Why do public organizations and communities collaborate with each other? And what are the social and environmental outcomes of collaborative governance? This dissertation develops three essays to answer both questions. The first essay applies a conjoint experiment to investigate the determinants of interlocal collaboration decisions of U.S. municipal officials. This research extends multiple organizational network theories to organizational decision makers. The findings confirm these theories and offer new insights. The second essay explores the effects of trust in government on citizens' perceived collaborative governance and their willingness to coproduce. Using randomly assigned government integrity information as the instrumental variable of trust, the results reveal complex relations of citizen-state interactions. The third essay examines the outcomes of intergovernmental collaboration in water pollution control in China. Using the water quality panel data with the synthetic control method, this study finds that the mandated collaborative governance model effectively reduced the level of water pollution in an inter-jurisdictional river. Overall, this dissertation explores the theory of collaboration from its initial motivation to its final outcomes. The utilization of various innovative causal identification methods moves the research of collaborative governance a little step forward.

Author: Yefeng Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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.

Author: Andrew Dobson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191522384
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice brings together leading international figures in political theory and sociology, as well as representatives from the political community, to consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. It raises important questions and sets out to provide the answers. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is `sustainability' an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible with intra-generational justice? Is environmental sustainability a luxury when social peace has broken down? These essays emerged from three intensive seminars that involved participants in constant re-evaluations of their work, and which bought three distinct groups—environmental theorists, `mainstream' political theorists, and policy community members—into fruitful contact. In particular, the attempt to involve `mainstream' theorists in environmental questions, and to encourage environmentalists to use intellectual resources of political theory, should be highlighted.

Author: Runa Sarkar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811031231
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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This book offers a comprehensive overview of sustainability and management in India and through its insightful essays highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of sustainability as a concept. It also demonstrates the debates surrounding the concept of sustainability and its ramifications for ground-level practice in managing organisations and for public policy. The contributions from sustainability enthusiasts, practitioners from disparate fields and academics working at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, have been divided into five themes: (1) sustainability as a normative concept; (2) sustainability concept at the global level, (3) sustainability practices in Indian organisations and consumer behaviour; (4) sustainability, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility and (5) sustainability: a critique of organisational practice and government regulation. The themes reflect both new and continuing issues confronting management in the country today. Examples and in-depth studies make it relevant to the grounded reality in India. The expertise and experience of the contributors ensure that readers are left with a grasp of our current understanding of how sustainability is related to society and business, the direction this understanding will take in the future.

Author: Tobias Oberpaul
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3947095112
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Compensation contracts have become ever more complex and individualized, particularly in the executive compensation domain, where increasingly diverse stakeholder demands and governance requirements have led to the inclusion of more and increasingly interrelated components into compensation contracts. Even the compensation of lower-level employees has become complex as firms individualize employee compensation and use many different rewards simultaneously. Research has examined elements of compensation in isolation but has attempted to avoid the complexities of compensation. This dissertation examines the consequences of compensation complexity and compensation design dispersion and contributes to a better understanding of compensation and its consequences for firms and employees. The first study examines how the complexity of executive compensation contracts affects firm performance. It finds that CEO compensation complexity negatively affects accounting, market, and ESG (i.e., environmental, social, and governance) metrics of firm performance and explores mechanisms that help explain the relationships. The second study examines the effect of compensation design dispersion within top management teams and its impact on executive turnover. The results show that compensation design dispersion affects executive turnover, both directly and in interaction with relative pay level. The third study addresses the role of compensation design dispersion in the development of procedural justice perceptions. Using two experiments, this study shows that compensation design dispersion causes lower procedural justice perceptions, which appears to be less problematic for participants with relatively easier to understand contracts. In summary, this dissertation provides a nuanced overview of complex compensation design and compensation design dispersion. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the effectiveness of compensation as an incentive and sorting tool for organizations, and of the implications of compensation design for the functioning of teams.

Author: Y?ld?r?m, Seda
Publisher: IGI Global
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
The challenge of achieving sustainability is complex and multifaceted, with varying approaches and policies across different countries and industries. This lack of universal standards poses a significant obstacle to the global transition towards a sustainable future. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated these disparities, highlighting the urgent need for cohesive and practical sustainability strategies. What sets Green Transition Impacts on the Economy, Society, and Environment apart is its comprehensive and unique solution to this pressing issue, offering a unified framework for sustainability that can be applied across diverse contexts. By gathering insights and approaches from researchers worldwide, this book provides a holistic view of sustainability, addressing critical issues such as climate change, energy security, and social responsibility. It offers practical solutions and case studies demonstrating effective strategies for achieving sustainability goals. Through this approach, the book aims to equip policymakers, practitioners, and researchers with the knowledge and tools needed to navigate the complexities of sustainability in the 21st century.

Author: Dustin Cole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Businesses are increasingly being called upon to improve their Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) performance. The need to tackle a range of concerns, both environmentally and socially, can be seen in the United Nations' 17 development goals set forth in 2015. Beyond governments and regulators, businesses themselves are increasingly aware of the importance of addressing such issues. Two hundred of the top CEOs of the country have emphasized the importance of the role that businesses play in confronting community-related issues and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) (Murray 2019). In a series of three essays, this dissertation focuses on the social and environmental sustainability aspects of ESG, thus contributing substantially to the overall domain of sustainability. The first essay examines the impact of leader-worker disability status similarity on front-line manufacturing worker productivity using micro-data gathered from a real-world organization in Michigan. It contributes to the nascent field of inclusive operations and explores how organizations can both be profitable and inclusive of traditionally marginalized workers. The essay focuses on the moderating influence of direct supervisors with a disability on workgroup productivity as the number of workers with disabilities increases. Results suggest that a direct supervisor with a disability does indeed benefit the productivity of workers with disabilities. This benefit, however, is the mitigation of potential productivity declines as the number of workers with a disability increases in the workgroup. A follow-up qualitative study is performed to understand the mechanisms of the productivity benefit by interviewing 50 workers and supervisors with and without disabilities across three organizations. The second and third essays focus on the issue of water, a resource that is increasingly important as an environmental concern. As a resource shared between communities and firms, water is an essential component of building sustainable cities and communities.The second essay examines trade-offs and synergies experienced by organizations when reducing water use and carbon emissions using secondary panel data of large firms. Previous research has found differing results of organizations trading off carbon emissions and water. Some have found reducing one comes at the expense of the other, while other research has found organizations can reduce these two concerns jointly. This past research, though, has generally been qualitative and at the facility level, without quantitative analysis at the firm level. This research fills this gap by providing a firm-level examination of such potential trade-offs using a combination of Data Envelopment Analysis and econometric methods.The third essay uses a vignette experiment with real-world procurement professionals to examine how buyers weigh the competing environmental concerns of carbon emissions and water use reductions in the supply chain against supplier location (local vs. offshore suppliers). The results show an overwhelming preference for local suppliers with lower carbon emissions, to the extent that a supplier with a superior overall environmental performance may be passed over in pursuit of local suppliers with marginally lower carbon emissions.

Author: Ibolya Schindele
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9051709471
Category : Contracts
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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