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While prior work has investigated the impact of (a) ownership structure and (b) board gender diversity separately on corporate environmental performance, researchers have not studied the potentially important relationship between ownership control and female board diversity in influencing corporate environmental performance jointly. We do so in the context of majority ownership in family‐controlled and dual‐class firms whose motives and influence are theoretically different from that of the firm's minority shareholders. Drawing on resource dependency, socioemotional wealth theory, and secondary agency theory, we hypothesize that majority family owners and dual‐class owners likely choose women directors to help advance their personal preferences for environmental corporate social responsibility. Our empirical tests utilizing 2,755 U.S. firm years over the 2010–2015 show that, as hypothesized, these two majority ownership types interact with board gender diversity to positively influence corporate environmental performance.

Empirical research in the area of corporate sustainability highlights potential confl icts between corporate fi nancial performance and environmental performance. In such a situation, agency theory arguments applied to the corporate environmental context predict that top management compensation should be explicitly linked to environmental performance in order to bring about proper alignment of organizational environmental goals and management incentives. We test this proposition for a sample of 207 Standard & Poor 500 fi rms in the US in 1996 who explicitly report in Investor Responsibility Research Council (IRRC) surveys the presence or absence of a contractual link between environmental performance and executive compensation. We fi nd that only in fi rms with an explicit linkage between environmental performance and executive contracts is there is any evidence of a signifi cant impact of fi rm-level environmental performance on CEO compensation levels. However, even this impact is not very impressive since (a) it holds only for IRRC compliance and spill indices and does not hold for IRRC toxic emission indices, and (b) even the effects for compliance and spill indices do not hold relative to industry levels of these indices.

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There is an ongoing debate over the impact of corporate pro-environment actions and strategies (reflected, for example, in pollution prevention and emission reductions, product re-design, materials stewardship) on corporate financial performance in US corporations today. A review of the existing literature in this area yields no consistent pattern of relationships between corporate environmental proactivism and financial performance when historical corporate accounting performance and stock market measures of performance are used. We revisit this relationship using a novel measure of firm performance: security analyst earnings forecasts. Specifically, we demonstrate a significant, negative relationship between environmental proactivism (using Toxic Release Inventory data) and industry analyst 1-and 5-year earnings-per-share performance forecasts for a sample of 523 US firms in 1992. We discuss the implications of these findings and provide suggestions for future research.