Are shareholders environmental "laggards"? Corporate Governance and environmental firm performance

Abstract

From a reactive, antagonistic stance towards environmental regulations, many firms have evolved to act in a pro-active fashion to integrate environmental issues into their core strategies. Using measures of different corporate governance instruments that proxy for the ability of managers or shareholders to implement their strategic preferences we demonstrate empirically that shareholders are indeed laggards because they lower firm environmental performance while the latter actually has positive effects on firm financial performance. Managers, however, push for better environmental and hence financial performance and thus act against shareholders preferences, but in their interest.Corporate governance, Environmental performance, Financial performance