The emergence of socially responsible investing has led to the development of a large number of methodologies for rating corporate social responsibility and to a growing body of research exploring the link between environmental and financial performance. Increased availability of information potentially generates an abundance of riches upon which to base investment decisions, but it also raises issues of commensurability, information overload, and confusion. Using a unique data set combining environmental ratings from three leading purveyors, we identify the principal components of corporate environmental performance. We find that two distinct factors-the environmental processes and practices implemented by firms, and the environmental outcomes they generate-explain 80% of the variance of the data. We also find corporate financial performance to be associated to process but not to outcome measures.

While corporate sustainability has been defined as an approach that creates long-term value with minimum environmental damage, there is still little understanding of the time horizon over which improved environmental performance leads to improved financial performance. We investigate the relationship between environmental and financial performance under increasing likelihood of environmental regulation. We leverage longitudinal data for 1,095 U.S. corporations from 2004 to 2008, a period of increasing activity for climate change legislation, in order to estimate the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on short- and long-term measures of financial performance. We find that during this period, improving corporate environmental performance causes a decline in an indicator of short-term financial performance, return on assets. Nonetheless, investors see the potential long-term value of improved environmental performance, manifested by an increase in Tobin’s q. These results suggest that limited uptake of proactive strategies may in part be attributable to short-term financial performance targets that guide managerial decision making.

In 2013, the energy and natural resources sector spent $359 million lobbying. Such spending is largely perceived as a strategy by industry to oppose regulation. Research has barely begun to investigate how firm-level performance on salient political issues affects corporate political strategy. In this paper, we address this issue 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 lobbying expenditures. To test our hypothesis, our study leverages novel data on firm-level GHG emissions and lobbying expenses aimed specifically at climate change legislation. Our results based on 3,194 firm-observations during a 4 year-period, suggest that both dirty and clean firms are active in lobbying, which challenges the view of adversarial corporate strategy.

The results show that the probability of occurrence of a negative phase surrounded by two positive phases within a 107-year period is approximately 9.9%. The raw data's mean positive phase length is close to the simulation mean and median, while the absolute difference in maximum positive/negative phase lengths corresponds to a p-value of 14.9%. The methodology developed in this paper can be useful to ecologists in assessing the potential ecological effects due to PDO variation, and for estimating the probabilities associated with future phases or other events.