This study aims to examine the trends in the sustainability performance indicators disclosed in sustainability reports by Canadian companies. Our sample is comprised of eight companies in four sectors and our observations cover a 19-year period. The results of our analysis show a general...

Increasingly, firms are under pressure to take responsibility for the externalities their business activities generate. To avoid being targeted by activists, firms may engage in self-regulation. We study this phenomenon in the context of the payment transparency movement in extractive...

Due to its great contribution to environmental pollution, the American utility industry is increasingly under a high level of scrutiny by its stakeholders. Proponents of the legitimacy theory, argue that poor environmental performers are likely to voluntarily disclose more environmental...

I study how voluntary disclosure of information affects outcomes in plea bargaining. A prosecutor negotiates a sentence with a defendant who privately knows whether he is guilty or innocent. The prosecutor can gather evidence regarding the defendant's type during negotiations, and a trial...

We investigate the effects of incentive-alignment mechanisms on voluntary disclosure of carbon emissions in Korea, a latecomer in incorporating environmental practices into business operations. We consider in particular the effects of corporate governance and compensation mechanisms. We find...

Property law responds poorly to the lived reality of the climate crisis. In particular, it fails to address the uncontrollable negative externalities endemic to this crisis. Today, we need and share resources from which it would be ineffective and harmful to exclude our neighbors. Yet exclusion...

Voluntary contributions to public goods may be motivated by a desire to be a moral person, or in other words, by identity concerns. In a field experiment (N=373) we test how positive and negative shocks to subjects' environmental identity affect voluntary efforts for climate protection. In a...

We examine the association between mandated Asset Retirement Obligations (ARO), i.e., environmental clean-up costs of normal operations estimated on the balance sheet, and the quality of voluntary ESG disclosures. We hypothesize that when firms recognize larger AROs with higher accuracy that...

Digital platforms such as Amazon Marketplace or Google Search are commercial and political actors. They have taken center-stage as new spaces for exchange. They facilitate digitally networked interactions and transactions between different customer groups through algorithms, data, and other...

This paper addresses how European policymakers have delegated the responsibility of protecting European values inside transnational data flows to private bodies acting as regulatory intermediaries. The paper uses a process-tracing methodology to argue that by accrediting private bodies to...

Large chocolate manufacturers have committed themselves to only using certifiedcocoa beans and some governments want to increase the share of certified cocoaproducts consumed in their countries. Thus, Voluntary Sustainability Standards(VSSs) become quasi-mandatory for cocoa producers and...

Industry-wide voluntary agreements are touted as a means for corporations to take more corporate social responsibility (CSR). We study what type of joint CSR agreement induces firms to increase CSR efforts in a model of oligopolistic competition with differentiated products. Consumers have a...

There are frequent calls for financial markets to be more actively regulated by state agencies, such as the Financial Conduct Authority or the Prudential Regulation Authority. They reflect neo-classical, market-failure approaches to economics, which suggest that the market does not maximise...

The touchstone of antitrust compliance is competition. To be legally permissible, any industrial restraint on trade must have sufficient countervailing procompetitive justifications. Usually, anticompetitive horizontal agreements like boycotts (including a refusal to produce certain products)...

One category of voluntary approaches to environmental governance is ecolabels used to nudge consumers towards purchasing environmentally friendly products. The purpose of this article is to critically review the trade law implications of voluntary ecolabels, with special reference to the EU...

Traditional regulatory interventions such as building codes and planning legislation often fall short in accelerating the transition towards sustainable built environments. Seeking to overcome their problems governments around the globe are increasingly relying on governance innovations, as do...

Public information that becomes available after a manager’s initial voluntary disclosure decision creates incentives for her to reconsider and possibly change that decision. We show that if she has private information that is value relevant or that impacts the firms ability to compete in its...

We meta-analyze research on why firms join voluntary environmental programs (VEP) to assess the impact of program stringency, or the extent to which they have rigorous, enforceable standards on these decisions. Stringency creates trade-offs for firms by impacting programs’ effectiveness,...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Provided that the contest is uniformly asymmetric, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome. This is so because the weakest type of the...

Our study focuses on the value relevance of corporate voluntary carbon disclosure. Our sampleincludes firms from the United States (listed in the S&P 500) and firms from Brazil, Russia,India, and China that are targeted by the CDP. We examine whether the capital marketrewards firms’ voluntary...

The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels. A key component of the agreement are "nationally determined contributions" (NDC). For this, non-state actors such as civil society groups, economic actors, and subnational...

In this study, we examine the equilibrium effects of ESG quality disclosure in both voluntary and mandatory regimes. A firm manager makes a private investment decision in an environmentally friendly or unfriendly project that affects future cash flows and the social externalities produced by the...

The countervailing effect of MiFID II’s unbundling provision, which requires brokerages to separate research costs from trading execution costs, on the capital market has led to controversies about its efficacy and its potential rollback. In this paper, we examine the role of firms’...

Why do for-profit firms take voluntary steps to improve the environment? Brand appeal to green consumers or investors, the ability to influence or avoid regulation, or the experience gained for future regulation, have all been suggested as possible reasons. The empirical evidence is decidedly...

The impact finance market has sought to 'internalise externalities and adjust risk perceptions' (G20 Green Finance Study Group, 2016), demonstrating the private sector's capability in resolving the climate free-rider problem through the 'greening' of economic activities, partially bypassing...