No abstract

Each year, hundreds of firms are prosecuted for violating environmental laws and hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties are assessed. At the same time, a much larger number of firms escape the various costs associated with litigation by adhering to the provisions of the same laws and regulations. It is not a priori apparent why this dichotomy exists. In this paper we draw on corporate governance and stakeholder theories to empirically investigate environmental lawsuits. Specifically, we compare the pre-lawsuit profile of 209 violators to a sample of matched control firms between 1994 and 1998. We find that the likelihood of becoming a lawsuit defendant increases with board size, with the fraction of directors in industrial firms, and with the fraction of inside ownership, and decreases with the number of directorships held by outside directors. These findings are robust to alternative dependent variable specifications. Together, our results suggest that managers, researchers, and policy-makers need to direct their attention to the corporate board as the core decision-making unit forming corporate environmental policies.

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between gender and environmental sustainability. Based on a sample of 296 firms, drawn from the population of US publicly traded firms over a five-year period, we empirically test whether firms that have (1) more gender diverse boards of directors and (2) more policies and practices that enable or reinforce gender diversity throughout the organization, adopted more environmentally responsible policies and practices. We find that both 'demographic' and 'structural' gender diversity are significant predictors of a firm's environmental sustainability initiatives. Our findings show gender diversity is a sustainability issue as well.

This paper explores the relationship between environmental practices and performance in services and the impact of such practices on the external portion of the service profit chain. Using structural equation modeling, it tests the hypotheses developed with data from the European hospitality industry. The findings suggest that environmental practices are positively related to performance through the mediating effect of enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty. The paper's contributions include: the conceptual development of the relationship between environmental practices and performance in services, the incorporation of environmental practices within the service profit chain, and the testing of their impact on customer satisfaction.

While downsizing has been widely studied, its connection to firm ownership status and the reasons behind it are missing from extant research. We explore the relationship between downsizing and family ownership status among Fortune 500 firms. Weâ\x90£propose that family firms downsize less than non-family firms, irrespective of performance, because their relationship with employees is based on normative commitments rather than financial performance alone. We suggest that their actions are related to employee- and community-friendly policies. We find that family businesses do downsize less irrespective of financial performance considerations. However, their actions are not related to their employee- or community-friendly practices. The results raise issues related to the motivations of large multinationals toâ\x90£downsize and the drivers of their stakeholder management practices. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007downsizing, family business, performance, stakeholder orientation,