Journal
JOURNAL OF BUSINESS ETHICS
Volume 159, Issue 4, Pages 1127-1146Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3866-6
Keywords
Investor relations officers (IROs); Board of directors (BoDs); Environmental Social and governance (ESG) criteria; Socially responsible investment (SRI); Corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR); France
Funding
- chair for Sustainable Finance and Responsible Investment (chair FDIR-Toulouse IDEI & Ecole Polytechnique)
- Research program Investissements d'Avenir [ANR-11-IDEX-0003/Labex Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX-0047]
- Group SoGReS-MF (Sustainability of Organizations and Social Responsibility Management-Financial Markets)
- Universitat Jaume I [E-2013-10]
- chair for Energy and prosperity, finance and evaluation of energy transition
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This paper examines the relationships between corporate governance and corporate sustainability by focusing on two main components of companies' governance structure: boards of directors (BoDs) and investor relations officers (IROs). We propose an original empirical strategy based on the 120 biggest French capitalizations for the year 2013, allowing us to measure boards of directors' independence and expertise, as well as investor relations officers' convictions and communication on corporate sustainability. Our results show that corporate governance has an ambiguous impact on corporate sustainability because of opposing forces: internal, external and intermediate forces. On the one hand, the higher the proportion of inside directors, the higher the company's environmental and governance performance, while the higher the proportion of general experts in the board room, the lower the company's governance performance. On the other hand, investor relations officers' beliefs that corporate sustainability is primarily driven by investors' ethical values appear negatively related to companies' governance performance. In sum, corporate sustainability appears positively related to internal forces (inside directors) and negatively related to external forces (general expert directors and investor activist engagement). The results of this study demonstrate the need to carry out efforts to train BoDs (specifically inside directors) and IROs to respond to corporate sustainability and to take more of a leadership role in this area.
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