Born to be green: new insights into the economics and management of green entrepreneurship

While the number of green start-ups has steadily increased around the world in response to the environmental problems demanding immediate solutions, there are several unresolved questions on the behaviour and performance of such ventures. The papers in this special issue shed light on these issues by underscoring the role of several factors, such as industry life cycles, knowledge spillovers, institutions, and availability of external finance, in shaping decision-making and firm behaviour in green start-ups. This paper highlights the state-of-the art developments in the literature, discusses the key contributions of the papers put together in this special issue and presents a future research agenda for scholars interested in green entrepreneurship

Component efficient solutions in line-graph games with applications

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. We investigate a class of cooperative games that generalizes some economic applications with a similar structure. These are the so-called line-graph games being cooperative TU-games in which the players are linearly ordered. Examples of situations that can be modeled like this are sequencing situations and water distribution problems. We define four properties with respect to deleting edges that each selects a unique component efficient solution on the class of line-graph games. We interpret these solutions and properties in terms of dividend distributions, and apply them to economic situations. © 2006 Springer-Verlag

Linking Employee Stakeholders to Environmental Performance: The Role of Proactive Environmental Strategies and Shared Vision

Drawing on the natural-resource-based view (NRBV), we propose that employee stakeholder integration is linked to environmental performance through firms’ proactive environmental strategies, and that this link is contingent on shared vision. We tested our model with a cross-country and multi-industry sample. In support of our theory, results revealed that firms’ proactive environmental strategies translated employee stakeholder integration into environmental performance. This relationship was pronounced for high levels of shared vision. Our findings demonstrate that shared vision represents a key condition for advancing the corporate greening agenda through proactive environmental strategies. We discuss implications for the CSR and the environmental management literatures, with a particular focus on the NRBV and stakeholder integration debates

Who Opposes Climate Regulation? Business Preferences for the European Emission Trading Scheme

When do firms oppose international climate policy? Existing work often assumes that firms disapprove of climate regulation due to the immediate costs of compliance. We claim that if policy is implemented gradually, private preferences for climate policy vary as a function of its progressive stringency. That is, supportive views may rise in the initial phase of the policy, while opposing views may emerge as the policy becomes more stringent. We also argue that emissions of individual companies, as well as emissions levels in their respective sectors, influence corporate positions on these two dimensions. We test our argument with new corporate survey data on the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). We find that firms’ views on the performance of the EU ETS vary based on whether they concentrate on the policy’s current state or its future, more stringent development. Moreover, we find that individual firm and sectoral emissions correlate with support for the early-stage, more lenient version of the ETS, but that high-emission firms are more interested in disinvesting and relocating if the ETS becomes stricter. Our findings imply that both firm and sectoral organization can constrain environmental regulation, and that domestic compensation, especially at early stages, can have important effects on the success of climate policy