This paper examines the spillover effect of environmental regulatory pressure on firms' green technological innovation, from the perspective of supply chain relationships. Analyzing data from Chinese listed companies, we find that the average environmental regulatory pressure faced by the customer firms of a supplier firm enhances the green patent applications filed by the supplier firm. When the industry of the supplier is more competitive or the proportion of the supplier's sales from its largest customer is higher, the supplier feels more pressured to pursue green innovation, resulting in more green patent filings. Thus, via their negotiation power, customer firms can prompt the supplier firm to innovate to meet their demand for green technologies. Finally, we show that this effect is particularly pronounced when the supplier firm has a strong financial position, is located in a highly marketized region, receives low R&D government subsidies, or enjoys a high ESG rating

We investigate two related questions about the trade-off between the short-term pressures on managers to meet earnings targets and the long-term environmental benefits of reduced pollution. Do firms release more toxins by cutting back on pollution abatement costs to boost earnings in years they meet earnings benchmarks? If so, is that relation weaker for firms with higher environmental ratings? Using Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data on toxic emissions, we find that U.S. firms pollute more when they meet or just beat consensus earnings per share (EPS) forecasts, suggesting that meeting expectations is a more important goal than reducing pollution. We find this relation is stronger, not weaker, for firms with higher environmental ratings: they increase pollution even more when meeting earnings benchmarks than firms with lower ratings. This suggests that highly rated firms build regulatory and reputational slack over time and use it when needed to soften the negative impact of increased pollution. We contribute to the real earnings management and environmental economics literatures by documenting a negative externality of financial reporting incentives on the environment and society. We also contribute to the corporate sustainability literature by showing that an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) focus does not curb managerial short-termism

In this study, we explore the impact of the establishment of environmental courts, an environmental justice system, on the cost of equity capital. Based on a quasi-natural experiment of establishing environmental courts in China, we find that they have a deterrent effect and reduce the cost of equity capital for heavily polluting firms in localities. We also find that a low proportion of managerial ownership, a low level of analyst attention, and high environmental uncertainty induce this deterrent effect. Furthermore, mechanism tests indicate that environmental courts enhance corporate environmental engagement and corporate ESG ratings, increase long-term institutional investor ownership, and reduce urban environmental violations to achieve a deterrent effect. The findings are more pronounced for the trial court sample, firms in cities with lower public participation in environmental protection, and firms with lower environmental information transparency. We also suggest the impacts and underlying mechanisms of the environmental justice system on the equity capital market, which is conducive to long-term planning by firm managers

From 2008 to 2020, 180 of S&P 1500 have disclosed employee diversity targets. We conduct the first analysis of firms’ employee diversity targets and ask three research questions: (i) who announces diversity targets? (ii) do firms deliver on their diversity targets? (iii) what are the implications of disclosure of such targets for employee hiring and investors? We find that firms with a greater willingness (proxied by past ESG penalties, higher CEO-to-median employee pay ratio, more media coverage, and after #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements) and ability (proxied by financial strength, a blue-collar heavy labor force, and gender and ethnic minorities on boards) to improve employee diversity are more likely to disclose diversity targets. Exploiting the Revelio dataset of 15,639 firm-years for 1,203 distinct firms from 2008 to 2020, we observe that firms that disclosed a diversity target have indeed hired more diverse employees, but such diversity levels had already increased substantially prior to the target disclosure. Firms with numerical, forward-looking, and rank-and-file employee-targeted goals are associated with greater employee diversity relative to firms that announce other types of diversity goals. Moreover, improved diversity performance does not appear to occur at the cost of employee quality, as measured by Revelio. Overall our results have practical implications for how investors and stakeholders might want to interpret corporate diversity targets

We analyse the effects of the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) launched by the ECB after the burst of the Covid-19 pandemic. The effects of the programme were different from the previous asset purchases. The PEPP significantly reduced the yield on bonds that at the same time were eligible to the programme and showed a green label. Via a triple difference estimator, we show that this effect is additional to the outperformance of greens vs non-green bonds that also occurred in the set of non-eligible bonds. All in all, the estimated impact stands at 51 basis points, a value that is significant also from an economic point of view: around 20 per cent of the cost of issuing a bond. From a climate change perspective, this evidence suggests that asset purchase programmes are an effective way of supporting firms financing climate-friendly investments on the bond market. In addition, we find that the issuers that benefitted most from the PEPP improved their ESG performance to a larger extent than other issuers

We study the asset market for pollutive plants. Firms divest pollutive plants in response to environmental pressures. Buyers are firms facing weaker environmental pressures that have supply chain relationships or joint ventures with the sellers. While pollution levels do not decline following divestitures, sellers highlight their sustainable policies in subsequent conference calls, earn higher returns as they sell more pollutive plants, and benefit from higher Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings and lower compliance costs. Overall, the asset market allows firms to redraw their boundaries in a manner perceived as environmentally friendly without real consequences for pollution but with substantial gains from trade

US state governments frequently provide firms with targeted subsidies. In exchange, recipients promise to create or retain a certain number of jobs in the subsidizing state. Using novel hand-collected data, we address three questions: (i) the extent to which firms meet job creation targets promised in their applications, (ii) the factors that determine which firms meet the targets, and (iii) the benefits to firms from meeting those targets. We find that 63% of subsidies awarded to publicly traded U.S. firms between 2004 and 2015 meet their promised job creation targets. Firms with poorer labor practices are less likely to meet their targets, as are politically connected firms that receive subsidies in election years. Conversely, promised job targets are also more likely to be met for subsidies accompanied by government press releases but less likely to be met for subsidies accompanied by firm press releases; the latter likely reflects the fact that firms put out press releases for larger subsidies with more ambitious job targets. In terms of consequences, firms that meet job targets are more successful at obtaining subsequent subsidies both in and out of subsidizing states. However, while firms’ success in meeting job targets is associated with an uptick in positive media coverage, this does not flow through to ESG ratings, even on scores specific to community impact. Our results should be of interest to both academics and policymakers interested in the design of state-level economic incentives

The world of capital markets is constantly evolving, driven by technological advancements and changing global economies, presenting challenges for accounting practitioners. Amid current dynamic capital markets, this paper proposes a pathway for generating innovative accounting research that addresses practitioners’ needs by focusing on three critical financial reporting areas: contingent claim securities, sustainability/ESG metrics, and cryptocurrencies/digital assets. Secondly, to address the complex research challenges before us, I propose that we, as accounting scholars, embrace educational changes that may enhance the early research career success of our doctoral students and junior scholars, given that the accounting industry is on the brink of a profound technological transformation. Finally, I urge us to foster academic change by leveraging our strengths within and across disciplines to meet the accounting challenges and opportunities ahead

The increasing societal focus on environmental issues leads to important questions about the relationship between corporate environmental (ESG) performance and firms’ cost of capital, but research on this topic remains scant. The real estate sector offers an ideal testing ground to investigate the relationship in two distinct manners, while specifically addressing concerns about endogeneity. We first investigate the spreads on commercial mortgages collateralized by real assets, some of which are environmentally certified. We then study spreads on corporate debt of property companies (REITs), both at issuance and while trading in the secondary market. The results show that loans on environmentally certified buildings command lower spreads than conventional, but otherwise comparable buildings, varying between 24 and 29 basis points, depending on the specification. At the corporate level, REITs with a higher fraction of environmentally certified buildings have lower bond spreads in the secondary market. These results are robust to different estimation strategies, and signal that environmental risk is efficiently priced in the real estate debt market

This study measures the financial impact of screening for environmental, social and governance criteria on corporate bond portfolios. Specifically, the risk-adjusted financial performance of 103 socially responsible bond funds in the US and the Eurozone is compared with a matched sample of conventional funds. During the period 2001–2014, socially responsible bond funds outperform by one-half of one percent annually. An evaluation of fund holdings and a performance-attribution analysis suggest that this outperformance is directly related to the mitigation of ESG risks, which is achieved by the exclusion of corporate bond issuers with poor corporate social responsibility activities. A separation of crisis and non-crisis periods further indicates that the outperformance is especially likely to occur during recessions or bear market periods. We confirm this crisis-related return effect from a sample of socially screened bond indices. Moreover, our results are robust to alternative definitions of sustainability, survivorship bias, fund characteristics and stable in the US and Eurozone sub-samples