Publikationen

I examine the value consequences of biodiversity incidents and their association with institutional ownership. Markets react negatively, with average shareholder losses ranging from $76 million to $344 million per incident. Additional stock price declines around subsequent earnings announcements are consistent with market underreaction. Institutional ownership is negatively associated with incident occurrence. Using plausibly exogenous shocks to monitoring intensity, I distinguish monitoring from selection effects. Long-term and domestic institutions, especially insurance firms and public pension funds, reduce incidents through active monitoring, whereas short-term and foreign investors, particularly investment advisors, exhibit selection behavior. Evidence from shareholder proposals supports a governance-via-voice mechanism, with withdrawn biodiversity-related proposals associated with lower incident re-occurrence. Finally, incidents are positively associated with the cost of equity capital, suggesting that investors demand compensation for biodiversity risk exposure.

Institutional investors improve the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance of small-and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Our difference-in-differences framework shows that the backing from private equity and venture capital funds leads to an increase in SMEs' externally validated ESG scores compared to their matched non-investor-backed peers. Consistent with "ESG-as-insurance" theory, the ESG performance of SMEs with a higher probability of failure is more likely to benefit from the backing of institutional investors. This positive effect is heterogeneous; while SMEs with high ex-ante ESG performance tend to further improve their ESG performance following institutional investor backing, SMEs with low ex-ante ESG performance are unlikely to implement any improvements. Entrepreneurial finance seems to help sustainable entrepreneurs develop into "sustainability champions," while neglecting the betterment of non-sustainable SMEs.

This paper contributes to the growing debate about the role of board-level sustainability committees, focusing on whether they leverage sustainability expertise for impactful environmental initiatives or purely serve as symbolic actions aimed at greenwashing. Using a large set of firms from 35 countries over the 2010–2017 period, we find that the presence of a sustainability committee is positively associated with higher-quality GHG emissions disclosure. This finding is robust to endogeneity and sample selection bias concerns. The sustainability committee effect is more pronounced when external environmental institutions are too weak to properly monitor corporate environmental disclosure. Our findings suggest that sustainability committees are not a symbolic management tool, but play a crucial role in enhancing corporate environmental disclosure.

Based on practices and legislation in the shipping industry, we construct a corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure index for listed shipping companies. We use Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques for Bayesian inference, and we estimate the marginal effects of firm characteristics on CSR disclosure for each firm. Our results show a positive relationship between CSR disclosure and financial performance for each firm in our international sample. Firm size, financial leverage, and ownership structure are also associated with CSR disclosure. Our findings suggest that a majority of listed shipping companies have integrated CSR practices into their strategic planning and operations.