Title: Corporate environmental performance, legal origin, and investor protection

Authors: Kam C. Chan; Mohamed E. Hussein; Gim S. Seow; Kinsun Tam

Addresses: Department of Accounting, Pace University, 861 Bedford Road, Pleasantville, NY 10570, USA ' Department of Accounting, University of Connecticut, 2100 Hillside Road, Unit 1041, Storrs, CT 06269, USA ' Milgard School of Business, University of Washington at Tacoma, 1900 Commerce Street, Tacoma, WA 98402, USA ' Department of Accounting and Law, State University of New York at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222, USA

Abstract: Global environmental disasters caused by corporate malfeasance have raised the public's consciousness for improvements in corporate environmental performance (CEP). There are many unknowns in the determinants of CEP. Adopting a legal origin framework, this study examines how CEP of a sample of large international firms relates to legal origin and investor protection. Consistent with expectations, we find CEP to positively relate to the civil law origin as well as investor rights and law enforcement quality. This study contributes to the literature by updating the measure of investor rights as applied to CEP studies, considering the enforcement dimension of investor protection, introducing more comprehensive proxies of CEP and corporate governance, and clarifying the influence of investor protection on CEP.

Keywords: corporate environmental performance; CEP; legal origin; investor rights; law enforcement.

DOI: 10.1504/IER.2020.112597

Interdisciplinary Environmental Review, 2020 Vol.20 No.3/4, pp.234 - 254

Received: 02 Feb 2020
Accepted: 14 Apr 2020
Published online: 22 Jan 2021 *

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