• 2018
• Book

Varieties of Green Business: Industries, Nations and Time

Published at a time of ever-increasing warnings that the pace of climate change and other environmental changes risks making the Earth unsustainable within our own lifetimes, this book looks at the past of green business to identify lessons for the future. It provides rich new evidence and insights on green business as it examines its variation between industries and nations, and over time. It shows the deep historical origins of endeavors to create for-profit businesses that were more responsible and sustainable, but also how these strategies have faced constraints, trade-offs and challenges of legitimacy. The industries covered range from sustainable finance and solar energy, to organic food and wine, eco-tourism and outdoor clothing. Strategies purused range from incremental shifts towards sustainability to abandoning for-profit business entirely and re-wilding and conserving millions of acres of lands in Latin America. The book's distinctivness lies in the use of original empirical data, and the willingness to engage with both sucessful and unsuccessful cases. The wide geographical coverage includes not only the United States and Europe, but also less studied settings, including Chile, Costa Rica, New Zealand and Japan. The book serves as a warning against facile beliefs in the potential of win/win solutions as business tries to reduce its environmental impact, or even save the planet. The lesson of history is that making business sustainable is a hard journey, littered with system-wide roadblocks, but it is a journey that is possible, and one that is urgently needed.

• April 2010
• Article
• Journal of Accounting & Economics

Executive Pay and ‘Independent’ Compensation Consultants

Executive compensation consultants face potential conflicts of interest that can lead to higher recommended levels of CEO pay, including the desires to “cross-sell” services and to secure “repeat business.” We find evidence in both the US and Canada that CEO pay is higher in companies where the consultant provides other services, and that pay is higher in Canadian firms when the fees paid to consultants for other services are large relative to the fees for executive-compensation services. Contrary to expectations, we find that pay is higher in US firms where the consultant works for the board rather than for management.

• October 2018
• Teaching Material

Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL