Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management最新文献

Research on corporate responses to climate change is becoming increasingly prevalent, as such responses are crucial for firms' survival and competitiveness. Although existing studies suggest stakeholder requirements as core drivers of corporate commitment to climate change, they fall short in explaining the mechanisms through which these requirements are translated into corporate responses. Drawing on signaling theory, this study addresses this gap by examining the signaling mechanisms between communities and firms, employing a multidimensional measurement and analyzing panel data using Poisson regression. The findings indicate that community engagement serves as a credible signal conveying community environmental requirements and facilitates corporate commitment to climate change, while heterogeneous firm responses are moderated by corporate environmental governance mechanisms. These results are consistent across multiple robustness tests. This study contributes to the existing literature on corporate commitment to climate change and signaling theory, offering academic and practical implications, and suggesting avenues for future research.

This paper aims to explore the public officials' intention to implement and use sustainable public procurement in Italian municipalities. The study posits on Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior and employs a structural equation model estimation on data gathered through a Likert-based questionnaire disseminated among Italian public officials in 2025. Main findings show that subjective norm, attitude, and perceived behavioral control are the main predictors of the intention to adopt sustainable procurement practices. Additionally, sustainability awareness and training significantly strengthen this intention. The study provides relevant insights into the debate on sustainable public procurement by highlighting the factors that influence public decision-making and the moderating role of perceived complexity in the decision process. This empirical contribution enriches the discussion on the adoption of sustainable procurement in the Italian public sector, offering practical implications by integrating the TPB with contextual variables and shedding light on the psychological and institutional mechanisms involved.

This study examines the relationships between ESG-based Sustainability Uncertainty (ESGUI) and key financial indicators—including stock markets, oil prices, gold prices, and the VIX index—across the G7 countries from 2003 M1 to 2024 M1. Using advanced econometric methods, the study captures how financial indicators respond differently to positive and negative ESG-related shocks and accounts for sudden changes in market behavior over time. The results show that ESGUI is strongly influenced by stock markets and the VIX index, particularly during negative shocks, with the US and France showing the greatest sensitivity, whereas Italy appears more resilient. These findings emphasize the importance for policymakers and investors to consider ESG uncertainty in financial decisions and highlight the strategic role of ESG risk indicators in market behavior under stress. Overall, the study contributes to the literature on ESG risks by integrating sustainability uncertainty into financial market analysis in a clear and practical way.

This study examines the impact of third-party ESG information provision on corporate labor employment using the inclusion of corporate ESG ratings by Bloomberg as a quasi-natural experiment. The analysis employs data from Chinese listed companies from 2006 to 2024. To address sample selection bias, the research uses a multi-period difference-in-differences approach combined with propensity score matching. The findings show that corporate labor employment significantly increases following their inclusion in Bloomberg's ESG rating system, a result that holds in various robustness tests. The mechanism analysis shows that third-party ESG information provision promotes employment by attracting institutional investors and easing financing constraints. Notably, the employment effect of ESG information provision by third-party rating agencies is more pronounced in private firms and firms with higher managerial ownership. These findings underscore the role of ESG rating agencies as information intermediaries in promoting employment through enhanced external governance and information transmission.

This research uses meta-analytical methods to systematically synthesise and quantitatively integrate prior studies linking board characteristics with voluntary carbon disclosure (VCD). The sample includes 54 empirical studies with 155 effect sizes and 403,855 firm-year observations, which were carried out across 16 countries between 2010 and 2022. The authors apply advanced statistical techniques to summarise the sample studies' findings and examine potential moderators' impact on the primary relationship. Supporting the agency and resource dependency theories, the results show that independence, gender diversity and size are the most effective board qualities for ensuring VCD, with CEO duality having no influence. Additionally, the study demonstrates that board features substantially impact VCD in nations following common law and having an emission trading scheme (ETS). Our research contributes to the body of knowledge on carbon disclosure by providing new meta-analytic evidence on the relationship between VCD and board measures. Our findings suggest policymakers should focus on institutional factors to attain carbon neutrality. There is future potential for meta-analysis on how stakeholder pressures impact voluntary disclosures. In addition to the conventional board proxies considered in our analysis, researchers can empirically examine how culture, audit committee characteristics and climate governance affect VCD.

In line with the objectives of the COP26 climate summit, this paper aims to (1) introduce a novel firm-level just energy transition (JET) index to assess firms' progress toward a fair and inclusive energy transition, and (2) advance the environmentalism strand of literature by examining how green dynamic capabilities (GDCs) enable this transition. Additionally, it investigates whether, following the Paris Agreement, the influence of GDCs on the JET differs between green and non-green firms. For our empirical investigation, we use a balanced panel of 11,132 firm-year observations from 484 firms operating across 11 industries in 12 Asian countries between 2002 and 2024. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach that focuses exclusively on the Paris Agreement as an exogenous shock, we demonstrate that GDCs have a significantly positive impact on the JET when supported by strong external institutional frameworks, such as the Paris Agreement. We also show that green firms with strong green capabilities lead inclusive energy transitions by effectively responding to institutional pressures post-Paris Agreement. In contrast, non-green firms lag behind due to weaker sustainability orientations and limited capability deployment, reducing their responsiveness to policy signals. Our results underscore the strategic value of integrating GDCs with institutional legitimacy to drive sustainable transformation. This research contributes to dynamic capabilities theory and the resource-based view by positioning GDCs as pivotal levers for aligning strategic intent with global sustainability imperatives.