Faculty & Research - Business & Environment

Research Summary

Building a Corporate Culture of Health

This stream of Professor Huckman's work involves developing and implementing a survey of U.S. corporations regarding their commitments to developing a “culture of health” aimed at improving well-being for employees, consumers, communities, and the environment. This...

2019
Working Paper

Understanding and Overcoming Roadblocks to Environmental Sustainability. Past Roads and Future Prospects

By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Shawn A. Cole, John Ehrenfeld, Andrew A. King and Auden Schendler

This working paper examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical...

2018
Working Paper

Corporate Sustainability: A Strategy?

By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim

We explore the extent of adoption of sustainability practices over time and the implications for firm performance. We find that for almost all industries, sustainability practices converge within an industry over time, implying that they spread as common practices. We...

2018
Working Paper

Southern Responses to Gold Certification: Cooperate, Compete, Reject, Revise

By: Kristin Sippl

Southern responses to Northern-led certification programs are understandable and largely predictable if the ideas, interests, and power of key actors are accurately assessed. When alignment and power are high, Northern programs will likely succeed. When they are low,...

2018
Working Paper

Public Sentiment and the Price of Corporate Sustainability

By: George Serafeim

Combining corporate sustainability performance scores based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data with big data measuring public sentiment about a company’s sustainability performance, I find that the valuation premium paid for companies with strong...

2018
Working Paper

Financing the Response to Climate Change: The Pricing and Ownership of U.S. Green Bonds

By: Malcolm Baker, Daniel Bergstresser, George Serafeim and Jeffrey Wurgler

We study green bonds, which are bonds whose proceeds are used for environmentally sensitive purposes. After an overview of the U.S. corporate and municipal green bonds markets, we study pricing and ownership patterns using a simple framework that incorporates assets...

September 2018
Case

The Progressive Corporation, 2018

By: John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock

This case addresses the rise of The Progressive Corporation (Progressive) as a top player in the property and casualty and auto insurance industries. In July 2018, Progressive, the USA's third largest auto insurance writer, reported half-year earned premiums up 21% on...

2018
Working Paper

Golden Opportunity? Voluntary Sustainability Standards for Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

By: Kristin Sippl

While much is known about transnational climate governance, less is known about transnationalism's contributions to the realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper helps balance the literature via comparative analysis of the...

2018
Working Paper

Ethical Hedonism? How Consumers' Prosocial Behavior Varies Along the Utilitarian-Hedonic Product Spectrum: Evidence from a Survey Experiment

By: Kristin Sippl

The marketing literature classifies products along a spectrum from utilitarian (e.g. rice) to hedonic (e.g. cannabis), and additionally using terms such as “luxury” and “illicit.” Research in business ethics has proposed a counter-intuitive mismatch between ethics and...

Third Quarter 2018
Financial Analysts Journal

Why and How Investors Use ESG Information: Evidence from a Global Survey

By: Amir Amel-Zadeh and George Serafeim

Using survey data from a sample of senior investment professionals from mainstream (i.e., not SRI funds) investment organizations, we provide insights into why and how investors use reported environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information. Relevance to...

September–October 2018
Organization Science

The Paradox of Responsive Authoritarianism: How Civic Activism Spurs Environmental Penalties in China

By: Christopher Marquis and Yanhua Bird

Recognizing the need to better understand institutional change processes in authoritarian states, which play an increasingly prominent role in the world economy, we examine the efficacy of civic activism aimed at spurring governmental action concerning the...

August 2018
Case

Israel — An Energy Leviathan?

By: Richard H.K. Vietor

In the last decade, Noble Energy and the Delek Group have discovered almost 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, offshore of Israel. For Israel, this has been an extraordinary turnaround, from energy dependence on Arab producers to energy independence and exporter....