Green carmakers and Caesar's wifeare they really above suspicion? Three essays on environmental innovations, voluntary disclosure and cooperation along the supply chain

Resumen

The following PhD thesis analyses three fundamental environmental issues. The first issue concerns the study of the relationship between environmental innovations and environmental performance in a high uncertain political context. Using a new approach to measure environmental innovations and new metrics to compute environmental performance, we assess in which environmental innovations companies invest to mitigate climate change through an improvement of environmental performance beyond the legislative requirements. By applying the Natural Resource Based View, we formulate the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1a: There is a positive relationship between investments in product stewardship innovations and the reduction of CO2 emissions. Hypothesis 1b: There is a positive relationship between investments in product stewardship innovations and the anticipation of EURO standard legislation. Hypothesis 2a: There is a positive relationship between investments in sustainable environmental innovations and the reduction of CO2 emissions. Hypothesis 2b: There is a negative relationship between investments in sustainable environmental innovations and the anticipation of EURO standard legislation. To test the hypotheses, we use a sample of 25 automakers between 2000 and 2006, obtaining a total of 135 observations. We use three panel regression models. In each model, the independent and control variables are one year lagged. We observe the environmental innovations that the automaker i undertakes until the year t-1 and then we measure their effects on the environmental performance in the period t. We compute three dependent variables to measure the improvement of environmental performance between 2001 and 2006 by using data from Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA): the minimum CO2 emissions, the average of CO2 emissions and the anticipation of EURO standard IV. On the other hand, the independent variables are Product Stewardship and Sustainable Environmental innovations. We approximate these variables by considering the projects that companies carried out under the EU Framework Programme between 2000 and 2005. By using data from CORDIS, we select all projects wherein automakers and their associated organizations participate, codifying them by content analysis. The results suggest that automobile companies mainly invest in sustainable environmental innovations to reduce CO2 emissions and in product stewardship innovations to anticipate legislative environmental standards. Thus, the main conclusion is that companies seem to adopt a proactive behaviour when they reduce emissions controlled through voluntary initiatives, whereas they appear to assume a conservative behaviour when they reduce emissions regulated through legislation. This study contributes to the literature by expanding our understanding of how companies invest in environmental innovations to improve the environmental performance of their products when uncertainties are created by the political context. We suggest which environmental innovations are important to mitigate climate change and how firms prioritize these innovations to reduce different pollutants. This study shows that despite automobile companies have faced the same level of market and technological uncertainty, they have tried to balance investments in diverse kinds of environmental innovations to reduce their environmental footprint, contributing to mitigate the climate change. We use a new empirical approximation to test this relationship. By introducing a new approach and data to measure environmental innovations and new metrics to compute environmental performance, we contribute to the empirical research as well. The second issue analyse the relationship between corporate strategy and quality of the corporate social and environmental reporting by integrating the Natural Resource Based View and Quality Signalling Theory. In particular, we suggest that to analyse how companies invest in sustainable development strategy is crucial to understand why quality disclosure varies among companies. We argue that firms tend to disclose quality information when they invest increasing resources in sustainable development strategies. In the literature, we identify three principles that underline the concept of sustainable development. Applying these principles to the firm level, we analyse how environmental integrity, economic prosperity, and social equity affect the quality of corporate social and environmental reporting. the hypotheses for this study are the following: Hypothesis 1: The more companies invest in projects related to environmental integrity, the higher will be the quality of their CSE reporting. Hypothesis 2: The more companies invest in projects related to social equity, the higher will be the quality of their CSE reporting. Hypothesis 3: The more companies invest in projects related to economic prosperity, the higher will be the quality of their CSE reporting. To test the hypotheses, we use a sample of 20 automakers between 2000 and 2007, obtaining a total of 125 observations. We use three panel regression models, wherein the independent and control variables are one year lagged. We observe the corporate strategies that the automaker i undertakes until the year t-1 and then we measure how they affect the quality of information that companies report in the period t. We measure the quality of CSE reporting by computing three reporting indexes (environmental, health & safety and diversity & human rights). The items of each index are selected after a deep review of the literature. Hence, we look for these items in all reports published in the website of the companies between 2001 and 2007. A total of 140 reports for 20 automobile companies are codified by content analysis. Content analysis is also the primary tool used to measure our independent variables environmental integrity, social equity and economic prosperity. These variables are measured by codifying the description of projects that companies carried out under the EU Framework Programme between 2000 and 2006. Following the literature, we identify concepts associated to principles of environmental integrity, social equity and economic prosperity and codify the projects into three dimensions. Our results support that the more companies allocate resources in projects related to environmental integrity, the more they report quality environmental information. Increasing investments in environmental integrity, instead, explain neither the quality of health & safety reporting, nor the quality of human right reporting. The more companies invest in projects related to economic prosperity, the more they report quality health & safety information as well as diversity and human rights information. However, the empirical evidence does not support that companies disclose quality information when they invest a high proportion of resources in projects related to social equity. Another interesting result is that companies having poor environmental performance disclose quality environmental information more than those companies that have good environmental performance. A first contribution to the literature of this study is to explain how the quality of CSE reporting varies among firms by examining the role of corporate strategy. Specifically, the way in which we examine the sustainable development strategy of companies through different dimensions provides new insights in explaining why the quality of information disclosed by companies differs among them. A second contribution of this paper is methodological. Drawing away from previous studies, we try to synthesize and homogenize previous studies providing a list of the most cited items used to measure the quality of CSE reporting. Thus, we try to introduce a greater rigour in the item selection. Moreover, we construct three different indexes: environmental, health & safety, and diversity & human rights indexes. Thus, we avoid the aggregation of several items of disclosure in one index to deepen understanding of how investments in sustainable development strategy affect the quality of CSE reporting. In this way, we offer further evidence on how to measure quality of CSE reporting through a set of well-identified items useful for future studies. The third issue examines whether logistics and product integration within supply chain encourage buyers and suppliers to cooperate in sustainable environmental R&D projects. By integrating the Natural Resource Based View and Transaction Cost Theory, we suggest that logistics and product integrations are critical factors to understand why buyers cooperate with some of their suppliers in sustainable environmental innovations. Following an inter-firm perspective, we argue that high logistics and product integrations reduce transaction costs, favouring cooperative R&D characterized by high technological uncertainty such as sustainable environmental R&D projects. Hypothesis 1: The more logistics integration between a buyer and a supplier, the more they cooperate in sustainable environmental R&D projects. Hypothesis 2: The more product integration between a buyer and its suppliers, the more they cooperate in sustainable environmental R&D projects. Tobit model is used to test hypotheses. We adopt buyer-supplier relationships as a unit of analysis, identifying for 10 automakers 111 relationships with their supplier relationships between 2003 and 2008, obtaining a total of 306 observations. By using data from Automotive News and SupplierBusiness, product integration is the ratio of the number of component types that each supplier procures to a specific automaker over the total component types that all suppliers provide to the same automaker. Logistics integration is the number of supplier's parks wherein a supplier is located over the total automaker's supplier parks. On the other hand, by using data from CORDIS, the dependent variable is the ratio between the total funds of sustainable environmental R&D projects wherein automakers and first-tier suppliers cooperate and the total funds in sustainable environmental R&D projects. The results support that the more buyers and suppliers are logistics and/or product integrated, the more they cooperate in sustainable environmental R&D projects. Important implications from these results are that logistics integration likely favours knowledge transfer in R&D projects characterized by high technology uncertainty, whereas product integration favours the communication between partners and reduces the difficulties related to the process of innovation. This study mainly contributes to the literature in green supply chain management. Few studies that have tried to understand the rationale that leads buyers and suppliers to cooperate in environmental innovations. Most of the efforts are focused on the analysis of which green initiatives or practices have been adopted within a supply chain; what factors determine their diffusion and how these affect either buyers or supplier performance. The assessment of whether logistics and product integration within supply chain can encourage buyers and suppliers to cooperate in environmental R&D projects provide a novel approach in this area of research. In this paper, we attempt to provide more insights about whether the relational characteristics such as integration are relevant factors to lead cooperative innovation. a second contribution is methodological. Most of the studies have tried to understand how buyer-supplier relationships affect cooperation using a single-respondent and dyadic samples. However, the antecedents and dynamics have mainly been tested on separate groups of buyers and suppliers, rarely between buyers and suppliers in the same relationship. Drawing away from previous studies, we adopt an inter-firm perspective to provide a better understanding of how integrated buyer-supplier relationship works in cooperative sustainable environmental R&D projects. The inter-firm level of analysis allows examining contemporary characteristics of both buyers and suppliers, keeping relevant information that individual perspective studies do not capture.