Green supply chain behavior and business performance: Evidence from China

At present, companies are increasingly pressed to respond to ecological development issues. Little research, however, links green supply chain (GSC) to companies' business performance. This paper uses top brands' micro-data and the Corporate Information Transparency Index (CM) developed by environmental non-governmental organizations to explore the causal relationship between GSC behavior and business performance in China. Based on a big database, the CITI can be used to reflect the GSC behaviors of selected brand enterprises by tracking which brand enterprises choose the products of hundreds of thousands of polluting enterprises as raw materials. The results show that GSC behavior measured by the CITI has a significant positive impact on the business performance measured by both return on assets and return on main business. Using the Baidu index as an instrumental variable for the CITI and the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method, the causal relationship is still robust. Furthermore, we investigate the influence mechanism of the CITI on the business performance. We find that a greater board size and female proportion in the board tend to have negative effects on a company's green supply chain decision-making, while a company whose chief executive officer holds a PhD degree is more willing to choose greener supplier.