Faculty & Research - Business & Environment

March 2020
Case

Generation Investment Management

By: Vikram S. Gandhi and Sarah Mehta

In January 2020, sustainable investment firm Generation Investment Management (Generation), was debating whether to terminate coverage of John Deere, one of its 47 portfolio companies. Generation believed that the type of mechanized agriculture enabled by John Deere’s...

2020
Working Paper

Corporate Environmental Impact: Measurement, Data and Information

By: George Serafeim, DG Park, David Freiberg and T. Robert Zochowski

As an organization’s environmental impact has become a more important societal consideration, thereby affecting industry and organizational competitiveness, interest in measuring and analyzing environmental impact has increased. We develop a methodology to derive...

March 2020
Accounting Horizons

Voluntary, Self-Regulatory, and Mandatory Disclosure of Oil and Gas Company Payments to Foreign Governments

By: Paul M. Healy and George Serafeim

Concerns about high rates of government corruption in resource-rich countries have led transparency advocates to urge oil and gas firms to disclose payments to host governments for natural resources. Transparency, they argue, can increase government accountability and...

Financial Times

Companies Must Include Environmental and Social Performance Measures

By: George Serafeim

February 2020
Case

Sustainable Product Management at Solvay

By: George Serafeim, Vincent Dessain and Mette Fuglsang Hjortshoej

In November 2019, Ilham Kadri, CEO of Solvay, a Belgian specialty chemicals and advanced materials group with annual revenues of more than 10 billion in 2018, announced the group’s mid-term strategy, eight months after she took the helm as Solvay’s 11th CEO. The case...

February 2020 (Revised March 2020)
Case

Prime Coalition: Catalytic Capital for Climate Innovation

By: Ramana Nanda, Benjamin N. Roth and Olivia Hull

With long development timelines and high risk, new energy technologies were often left to languish in the “valley of death,” unable to raise enough funds to bring a product to market. In 2014, Sarah Kearney founded the nonprofit Prime Coalition to solve this problem....

2020
Working Paper

A Preliminary Framework for Product Impact-Weighted Accounts

By: George Serafeim, Katie Trinh and T. Robert Zochowski

While there has been significant progress in the measurement of an organization’s environmental and social performance, metrics to evaluate the impact of products once they come to market lag far behind. In this paper we provide a framework for systematic measurement...

Forthcoming
Journal of Business Ethics

Material Sustainability Information and Stock Price Informativeness

By: Jody Grewal, Clarissa Hauptmann and George Serafeim

As part of the SEC’s revision of Regulation S-K, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which...

Forthcoming
Daedalus

Climate in the Boardroom: Struggling to Reconcile Business as Usual and the End of the World as We Know It

By: Rebecca Henderson

Forthcoming
AEA Papers and Proceedings

Tackling Climate Change Requires Organizational Purpose

By: Rebecca Henderson and George Serafeim

Unchecked climate change presents a profound threat to economic growth and political stability but despite widespread public concern about the issue, global emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have not declined. Indeed current “business as usual” predictions imply...

2020
Book Chapter

Interrogating Corporate Purpose: Values Based Firms and the Struggle to Build a Just and Sustainable World

By: Rebecca Henderson

Forthcoming
Book

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

By: Rebecca Henderson

Free market capitalism is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But this success has been costly. Capitalism is on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society as wealth rushes to the top....