Corporate Sustainability: A Strategy?
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 also find that the extent of convergence across industries is associated with the adoption of sustainability by the industry’s market leaders and the relative importance of environmental and social issues compared to governance issues. Further, we distinguish between a set of sustainability practices on which companies converge within an industry, which we term “common practices,” and a set on which they do not, which we term “strategic.” We subsequently explore performance implications and find that the adoption of strategic sustainability practices is significantly and positively associated with both return on capital and expectations of future performance as reflected in price to book valuation multiples, whereas the adoption of common sustainability practices is reliably correlated only with expectations of future performance. Overall, we provide evidence about the role of sustainability as a long-term corporate strategy and as a common practice.
Keywords: sustainability; Corporate performance; industry analysis; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Environmental Sustainability; Strategy; Performance; Corporate Strategy;
Citation:
Ioannou, Ioannis, and George Serafeim. "Corporate Sustainability: A Strategy?" Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-065, January 2019. View Details