The environment has traditionally been the domain of nonprofit organizations. For decades, nonprofit organizations have worked to reduce the negative impact of market-based activity on the environment. However, more recently nonprofits have started to adopt the methods and values of the market...

The state of the planet calls for large-scale sustainability transitions involving systemic adoption of markedly better environmental and social practices. The objective of this symposium is to better understand the role of corporations in promoting such systemic change. We present four case...

Corporate environmentalism - environmental improvement not required by law - has become increasingly prominent in recent years. The new emphasis on voluntarism makes little sense within conventional paradigms for understanding environmental policy. Because pollution abatement is costly, firms...

Social movement organizations increasingly engage directly with companies, rather than using the political process to regulate them. This development has spawned lively new literatures on non-market strategy and on social movements, but the two would benefit from engaging each other more...

A large literature studies why firms self-regulate and “signal green.” However, it has ignored that regulators have enforcement discretion, and may act strategically. We fill this gap. We build a game theoretic model of whether a firm should signal its type through substantial...

Companies and subnational governments are actively attempting to fill the greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation gap left by weak national policy, but how effective are their efforts in reducing GHG emissions? This is the first study to disaggregate corporate GHG reporting from CDP (formerly Carbon...

This article reviews the economic literature on voluntary approaches to environmental regulation. In the last few years there has been a rapid growth in the use of voluntary actions and programs to address environmental concerns. These approaches can be placed into three general categories: (1)...

As demands on global water resources intensify, battles are emerging over water ownership and governance. Evidence to support opposing views is scarce, however, especially with respect to the impact of ownership on water quality. Using a data set of 168,823 municipal water systems in the United...