Business Ethics the Environment & Responsibility最新文献

Innovations in aligning investment with sustainability led to impact investing, enabling investors to achieve conventional financial returns and measurable social and environmental returns. Since its inception in 2007, it has grown manifolds, with significant efforts being made to create a global ecosystem. However, due to limited academic literature, the theme is yet to garner the scholarly interest it deserves. In this study, we analyse and visualise a knowledge map of the impact investment research field through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis by employing a research corpus of 421 studies sourced from Web of Science and Scopus. We identify the growth trajectory, geographical concentration, productive and influential authors, journals and significant articles and examine the inter-disciplinarity of the field. The major research themes interlinked with impact investing included; social entrepreneurship, social innovation, social finance, impact investment market, innovative financial instruments, financialisation of essential services and impact reporting. To drive the field forward, future research needs to develop an impact investment ecosystem, address behavioural issues, stakeholder management and institutional context in impact investment theme, develop and diffuse innovative financial instruments, develop a framework for standardised accounting and reporting practices to measure financial and non-financial dimensions, tackle impact washing by fund managers, address lack of financial access to the third sector and develop the legal and regulatory framework for third sector organisations.

The widespread critical evidence surrounding executive compensation of listed corporations has boosted shareholder activism in recent decades. The say-on-pay (SOP) mechanism—a vote in which shareholders express their (dis)agreement with executive pay designs—is one of the corporate governance mechanisms that has led to this activism among listed firms. Merging agency and socioemotional wealth (SEW) arguments, this paper analyzes how effective SOP voting results are among listed family firms in terms of CEO compensation efficiency and equity. Using a sample of UK listed firms from 2011 to 2018, our results show that SOP effectiveness is positively influenced by family ownership and is strongly moderated by family involvement in management and in governance as well as by family generation. Our findings stress the strong family effect and the ethical perceptions of family shareholders on SOP voting, showing how family participation in the firm encourages fairer and more aligned CEO compensation packages. SOP institutional and practical implications oriented to preserve shareholder value and family wealth are finally outlined.

We explore the impact of board resources arising from diverse board members on the achievement of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. Employing resource dependence theory as our frame and drawing on qualitative data from 41 interviews with board directors of publicly traded and privately held companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), we identify three key mechanisms underpinning the achievement of ESG goals, namely, the leveraging of particular connections, the deployment of different resources, and the harnessing of a range of diversity types. We find that the use of social resources is often related to environmental concerns and occasionally social goals, but rarely governance issues. We also find that financial motivations often drive environmental issues, while many of the social resources that added value occurred in the public sector. Importantly, the combining of both skill and social resources, rather than relying on each alone, was seen to increase the likelihood of achieving ESG goals. Our findings also point to the importance of board diversity in accomplishing the board's ESG goals, most especially functional diversity. We propose that such functional diversity, along with resources in the form of social resources and skills, needs to feature more prominently in order to improve ESG performance and outcomes. We highlight the implications of our work, especially regarding the establishment of board diversity policies beyond gender alone.

The study comprehensively reviews previous research work in the domain of ‘Organizational Virtuousness’ (OV) using bibliometric and content analysis. It aims to provide insights into what is known about the field and where future research should be directed. As many as 193 published research articles during the last two decades (2004–2022) were retrieved from the Scopus database. These articles were thoroughly studied and then examined using VOSviewer and the Biblioshiny package of R software for bibliometric insights. The findings of the analysis have pinpointed the most influential journals, authors, and keywords and discovered seven research clusters. Notably, this study is one of the foremost attempts to review the extant research body on OV, and it inarguably helps and guides future research and practice.

Heterogeneous institutional investors' shareholding preferences have been driven to change by the deepening of ESG investment philosophy. Therefore, we examine the impact of corporate ESG performance on institutional investors' shareholding preferences and its mechanism of action. We conduct mixed OLS and mediation effect tests using data on ESG responsibility scores and institutional investors' shareholding ratios of A-share listed companies in China from 2010 to 2020 as samples. We find that corporate ESG performance can significantly and robustly increase institutional investors' shareholdings; the mediation effect analysis shows that overall corporate ESG performance contributes to increases in corporate book and market values, thus encouraging institutional investors to increase their shareholdings. The heterogeneity analysis shows that independent institutional investors attach more importance to corporate ESG responsibility performance, and long-term institutional investors attach more importance to corporate environmental performance; moreover, institutional investors have more significant ESG shareholding preferences for Chinese SOEs. Our study can strengthen the encouragement of institutional investors to integrate ESG investment concepts from multiple perspectives, such as research and analysis, portfolio management, risk control, and due diligence management, to design and develop targeted ESG investment tools, give full play to the role of shareholders and guide the sound development of listed companies from the perspective of investment strategy objectives.

The current literature expands the existing knowledge of the antecedents of proactive environmental strategies (PES) in family firms from the perspectives of institutional, market and family involvement logics. However, scholars have not considered the influence of key family decision-makers and their characteristics in this regard. Based on the ability and willingness framework, this study focuses on how founders' religiosity affects family firms' PES. Using data from the 2010 Chinese Private Enterprise Survey conducted by Chinese officials, we found that founders' religiosity drives family firms to implement PES. Altruistic and long-term orientation are the internal mechanisms of this effect. Founders' political status enhances the positive impact of their religiosity on PES, whereas the founders' need for socioemotional wealth protection weakens the relationship between founders' religiosity and family firms' PES. We also found that Eastern and Western founders' religiosity has an asymmetric effect on family firms' PES. This study contributes to the literature on the PES of family firms, the family firm's ability and willingness framework, and family business heterogeneity.

The Chinese government capped executive compensation in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to address income inequality and promote a more equitable distribution of wealth. This study investigates whether regulating top executives' pay alters their motivation for corporate green innovation (GI) initiatives. Using data from 2006 to 2018 for Chinese-listed SOEs, the regression analysis and difference-in-difference methods revealed that government restrictions on executive compensation negatively affect GI. Furthermore, the types of SOE results show that the negative effect of pay restrictions on GI exists only in local SOEs, as opposed to central SOEs. Moreover, high managerial shareholding positively moderates this negative effect, demonstrating that the adverse effects of compensation restrictions are mitigated by the convergence of interests between managers and stakeholders. These findings are robust to instrumental variables and other robustness tests. This study provides policy recommendations for the government to boost its assistance in GI and establish new environment-related incentives that motivate managers to promote GI and inspire enterprises to deploy sustainable environmental initiatives.