This study examines the role of judges' political affiliation in determining the outcomes of environmental lawsuits filed against public corporations and their economic impacts on the defendant firms. Drawing on legal theories of judicial decision making, individual judges are expected to play an important role in influencing lawsuit outcomes and consequently the sued firms' shareholder wealth. This study employs a hand-collected sample of environmental lawsuits filed in the U.S. Federal District Courts against public firms during 2000–2015, utilizing the random assignment of judges to lawsuits to combat endogeneity concerns. The empirical evidence shows that lawsuits with Republican-appointed judges are approximately 12% less likely to succeed in reaching a settlement compared with those adjudicated by Democratic-appointed judges, holding constant other lawsuit-, judge-, and firm-specific factors. Further, investors of defendant firms react more favorably to the outcome of a lawsuit adjudicated by a Republican-appointed judge compared with a Democratic appointee: the difference of 0.6% of market value during the three-day period surrounding the lawsuit conclusion represents a substantial saving of shareholder wealth. These significant differences are not attributable to alternative explanations, such as other judge idiosyncrasies or firm characteristics, and remain robust to a series of additional analyses. These empirical findings offer new insights into the significant impacts of judge political affiliation on corporate environmental litigation and provide novel evidence on the magnitude of their economic consequences.

This study examines the relationship between board gender diversity and corporate environmental violations. Drawing on gender socialization and diversity theories, greater female board representation and female chief executive officers (CEO) are expected to reduce the frequency of corporate environmental violations. Empirical evidence in this study shows that firms with greater board gender diversity are less often sued for environmental infringements. In contrast, CEO gender is linked to reduced environmental litigation only in firms with low female board representation. I explore the relationship between board gender diversity and improved corporate environmental policies as a mechanism to explain the reduced litigation frequency. The findings are robust to controlling for reverse causality, propensity score matching, subsample analyses, different variable definitions, alternative model specifications, and industry controls and adjustments. These findings provide important insights to investors, managers, and policymakers into the role of female leadership in public companies.

We examine executive turnover following environmental, antitrust, intellectual property (IP), and contractual lawsuits filed against their companies. We find that companies' responses to lawsuits depend on the nature of the allegations. In particular, contractual lawsuits are followed by increased turnover of CEOs and inside directors, whereas following environmental and IP lawsuits, only outside directors tend to depart. Antitrust lawsuits are followed by increased appointments of inside directors. We also find that lawsuit merit and pecuniary demands for damages play a role in determining executive turnover. In addition, we find some evidence of reduced CEO compensation following lawsuits. Overall, we provide insights into the effectiveness of the executive labor market in responding to alleged corporate wrongdoing.