What Distinguishes EMAS Participants? An Exploration of Company Characteristics

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating the business and financial characteristics, stakeholder pressure and public policies distinguishing companies that have implemented the European Eco-Management and Audit System (EMAS) and those that have not using a unique firm-level dataset of European publicly quoted companies. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First of all, the decision to implement EMAS has not been widely analysed. Secondly, we focus on European firms which allows us to assess if and to what extent European firms behave like their US or Japanese counterparts. We find that the EMAS participation decision is positively influenced by the solvency ratio, the share of non-current liabilities and the average labour cost. Also, two measures of company size are positively associated with EMAS participation: both the absolute company size as well as the relative size of a company compared to its sector average. The profit margin on the other hand exerts a negative influence according to our results. We further show that public policy can heavily influence the EMAS participation decision: companies whose headquarters is located in a member state that actively encourages EMAS have a higher probability of participation.EMAS, European Companies, Public Policy

Learning to synchronize : how biological agents can couple neural task modules for dealing with the stability-plasticity dilemma

We provide a novel computational framework on how biological and artificial agents can learn to flexibly couple and decouple neural task modules for cognitive processing. In this way, they can address the stability-plasticity dilemma. For this purpose, we combine two prominent computational neuroscience principles, namely Binding by Synchrony and Reinforcement Learning. The model learns to synchronize task-relevant modules, while also learning to desynchronize currently task-irrelevant modules. As a result, old (but currently task-irrelevant) information is protected from overwriting (stability) while new information can be learned quickly in currently task-relevant modules (plasticity). We combine learning to synchronize with task modules that learn via one of several classical learning algorithms (Rescorla-Wagner, backpropagation, Boltzmann machines). The resulting combined model is tested on a reversal learning paradigm where it must learn to switch between three different task rules. We demonstrate that our combined model has significant computational advantages over the original network without synchrony, in terms of both stability and plasticity. Importantly, the resulting models' processing dynamics are also consistent with empirical data and provide empirically testable hypotheses for future MEG/EEG studies

What Distinguishes EMAS Participants? An Exploration of Company Characteristics

Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed almost exclusively on US and Japanese firms. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major developed economic markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating the business and financial characteristics, stakeholder pressure and public policies distinguishing companies that have implemented the European Eco-Management and Audit System (EMAS) and those that have not using a unique firm-level dataset of European publicly quoted companies. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First of all, the decision to implement EMAS has not been widely analysed. Secondly, we focus on European firms which allows us to assess if and to what extent European firms behave like their US or Japanese counterparts. We find that the EMAS participation decision is positively influenced by the solvency ratio, the share of non-current liabilities and the average labour cost. Also, two measures of company size are positively associated with EMAS participation: both the absolute company size as well as the relative size of a company compared to its sector average. The profit margin on the other hand exerts a negative influence according to our results. We further show that public policy can heavily influence the EMAS participation decision: companies whose headquarters is located in a member state that actively encourages EMAS have a higher probability of participation