Research on the relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and financial performance (CFP) continuously receives high attention in both general media and academic publications. One central issue concerns the causal effects between the two constructs. Because existing primary literature is characterized by its heterogeneous study designs and mixed empirical evidence, the aim of this paper is to explicitly shed light on the causality effects between CEP and CFP by means of a meta-analysis of 893 empirical estimates from 142 CEP-CFP studies. Our findings suggest that in the short run (1 year), financial resources can increase a firm's environmental performance as proposed by the slack resources hypothesis; however, the effects disappear in the long run (after more than 1 year). Conversely, increasing environmental performance has no short-term effect on a corporate financial performance, whereas a firm significantly benefits in the long term, which is in accordance with the Porter hypothesis. Overall, our results show that the causality between environmental performance and financial performance depends on the time horizon.

Meta‐analysis has become the conventional approach to synthesizing the results of empirical economics research. To further improve the transparency and replicability of the reported results and to raise the quality of meta‐analyses, the Meta‐Analysis of Economics Research Network has updated the reporting guidelines that were published by this Journal in 2013. Future meta‐analyses in economics will be expected to follow these updated guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta‐analysis should deviate from them.

This study aggregates the mixed empirical evidence of the seven most commonly investigated determinants of corporate capital structure. We apply meta-regression analysis on a data set of 3,890 reported results, manually collected from 100 primary studies covering firm observations from 57 countries over the past 65 years. Our results reveal thatin descending order of importancetangible assets (positive sign), market-to-book ratio (negative sign), and profitability (negative sign) are significant determinants of corporate debt level. In addition, we identify the presence of publication selection bias in academic literature. Accordingly, specific results are systematically overrepresented, as authors prefer reporting statistically significant estimates in line with theory or corresponding to previous empirical research. Significant determinants as well as publication selection bias are more pronounced for characteristics like market-based measures of capital structure or total debt measures of capital structure or for top articles from highly renowned journals, as compared to book-based measures of capital structure or long-term debt measures of capital structure or randomly selected articles including more unknown and unpublished studies. Overall, these findings highlight the need to relativize existing statistically significant results in this field and instead provide independent analyses in future for scientific progress.

Although the existing body of empirical literature on the relation between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) is continuously growing, results are still inconclusive about this fundamental question in industrial ecology. Comparisons are difficult because of various estimation methods as well as the overall heterogeneous and complex interaction between the two constructs, but especially because of country-specific data sets. Consequently, we raise the question of whether regional differences are the driving force buried underneath the inconclusiveness. Therefore, the aim of this article is to explore this heterogeneity by aggregating 893 existing results from 142 empirical primary studies that are based on more than 750,000 firm-year observations. Our findings suggest a convex impact of a country's economic development on the magnitude of the CEP-CFP effect (i.e., the effect is positive in developing countries, disappears in emerging countries, and is again positive in highly developed countries). We also find that the overall positive relation strengthens for market-based CFP measures and diminishes for countries with civil law systems, firms from the service sector, reactive environmental activities, and process-based CEP measures. Further, several aspects of the examined data sample and the inclusion of relevant control variables explain heterogeneity in previous research results. Keywords:corporate environmental performance (CEP) corporate financial performance (CFP) heterogeneity industrial ecology meta-analysis moderating effectsSupporting information is linked to this article on the JIE website Over the past 40 years, hundreds of studies have found evidence for a positive relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). However, empirical results largely vary because of differences in their variable measures, sample compositions, Conflict of interest statement:The authors have no conflict to declare.

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