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.
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structure or long-term debt measures of capital structure or randomly selected articles including more unknown and unpublished studies.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.
This paper employs meta-analysis to aggregate and systematically analyze the mixed empirical evidence on the determinants of corporate hedging reported in 132 previously published studies covering data from more than 73,000 firms. Among the fourteen proxy variables analyzed by multivariate meta-analysis, three variables emerge as reliable explanatory factors for corporate hedging decisions supporting the bankruptcy and financial distress hypothesis: dividend yield (positive sign), liquidity (negative sign), and firm size (positive sign). Moreover, for tax-loss carry forwards (positive sign) and research and development (positive sign), our findings indicate a weak impact on corporate hedging behavior reflecting tax reasons, the coordination between financing and investment, and agency conflicts between shareholders and debtholders. Regarding the asymmetric information and agency conflicts of equity hypothesis, we find no explanatory power. The further analysis of heterogeneity via meta-regression reveals several factors that determine the mixed empirical evidence reported in previous studies. First, the results indicate that studies analyzing firms from North America report, on average, a lower impact of leverage on the corporate hedging decision. Moreover, studies examining more recent data samples tend to find a weaker relation between tangible assets and hedging, R&D and hedging, respectively. Overall, our results encourage scientific research to put more emphasis on finer-grained examinations of hedging variations and to discover rationales of corporate hedging extending classical financial theories.
The aim of this study is to analyze the interaction between capital structure decisions and risk management decisions as well as the channels through which they add value to firms. Competing theories are considered in an integrated path model, which we test by means of meta-analytic structural equation modelling (MASEM). This meta-analysis is based on 6,312 reported results, which are manually collected from 411 empirical studies. We find that capital structure mediates the relation between corporate financial hedging and firm value. In this regard, active risk management positively affects leverage by providing greater debt capacities. Furthermore, leverage has a negative impact on firm value. Hence, capital structure and financial hedging decisions appear rather as complements instead of substitutes. This implies that managers should leave additional debt capacities unused and instead use additional internal funds arising from active risk management to carry out profitable projects and research and development activities. Overall, corporate hedging is found to especially add value to a firm by lowering bankruptcy risks and underinvestment risks.
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