RT Article
T1 Corporate Environmental Responsibility and Firm Performance in the Financial Services Sector
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 131
IS 2
SP 257
OP 284
A1 Jo, Hoje
A1 Kim, Hakkon
A1 Park, Kwangwoo
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2015
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785655604
AB In this study, we examine whether corporate environmental responsibility (CER) plays a role in enhancing operating performance in the financial services sector. Because achieving success with CER investing is often a long-term process, we maintain that by effectively investing in CER, executives can decrease their firms’ environmental costs, thereby enhancing operating performance. By employing a unique environmental dataset covering 29 countries, we find that the reducing of environmental costs takes at least 1 or 2 years before enhancing return on assets. We also find that reducing environmental costs has a more immediate and substantial effect on the performance of financial services firms in well-developed financial markets than in less-developed financial markets. These results are economically and statistically significant and robust even after alleviating endogeneity and using an additional performance measure. We interpret our empirical results as supporting the social impact and reputation-building hypothesis. Our findings also suggest that policy makers dealing with corporate sustainability management should pursue an environment-centered industry policy not only at the manufacturing sector but also at the financial services sector, as firms in both sectors with lower environmental costs perform better.
K1 Environmental sustainability management
K1 Corporate Social Responsibility
K1 Financial Performance
K1 Environmental costs
K1 Corporate environmental responsibility
DO 10.1007/s10551-014-2276-7