Firms are increasingly held accountable for their suppliers' transgressions. Consequently, firms need to develop upstream visibility to exercise control over their supply chains. An emerging body of work has recognized the importance of supply chain visibility and has examined it using analytical models, behavioral methods, and case studies. Still, large-sample empirical evidence on the benefits of supply chain visibility remains elusive. We seek to bridge this gap by examining conflict minerals disclosures (mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act) and financial reports to evaluate whether firms with greater visibility into their conflict minerals supply chains achieve improved operating and market performance. We use the data from conflict minerals disclosures (Form SD) to distinguish between firms that have high or low visibility into their conflict minerals sources. Then, we use event study methods to analyze differences in operating and market performance between firms with high visibility and firms with low visibility. We find that firms with high visibility into their conflict minerals supply chains achieve higher profitability than comparable firms with less visibility. In addition, we find that firms with high visibility into their conflict minerals supply chains realize improved sales performance and stock market valuations. Our results are relevant to managers because they show that firms can attain operational and market benefits by improving visibility in their supply chains. K E Y W O R D Sconflict minerals, event study, operating performance, supply chain visibility

Research summary:Research on the link between financial and environmental performance implicitly assumes that firms will pursue profitable environmental actions. Yet, clearly, factors beyond profitability influence firms' environmental choices. We treat these choices as organizational change decisions and hypothesize that adoption of environmental initiatives is influenced by a combination of profit, level of disruption caused, and external influences. We test our hypotheses by examining firms' choices regarding implementation of energy-savings initiatives. We find that degree of disruption, number of prior local adopters, and strength of environmental norms affect the adoption decisions. In addition, the effect of disruption is amplified by the implementation costs, but is mitigated by the number of prior local adopters.Managerial summary: Often, in trying to improve firms' environmental performance, academics and stakeholders have focused on actions that simultaneously improve environmental and financial performance. This assumes that firms will undertake projects that offer such dual benefits. We consider what might prevent firms from pursuing such 'win-win' initiatives. We focus on how the degree of disruption of an energy-saving initiative affects its probability of adoption. We find that firms are significantly more likely to adopt moderately profitable, but easy initiatives than more profitable but disruptive ones. We also examine internal and external factors that moderate the effect of disruption. Our findings suggest that in order to incentivize firms to improve environmental performance, it might be more beneficial make these activities less disruptive than to make them more profitable.

a b s t r a c tBarriers to energy efficiency have been extensively discussed in the energy literature, but little is known about positive drivers. This paper investigates the role of top managers and more specifically of top operations managers on the adoption of energy-efficiency practices, based on 5779 energy efficiency recommendations made to 752 small and medium-sized manufacturing firms under the US Department of Energy's IACs (Industrial Assessment Centers) Program, through which teams of students and faculty from engineering schools provide free energy assessments. Top operations managers possess knowledge of production processes, for maximizing the effective manufacture and distribution of goods. We find that their involvement significantly increases the adoption of energy-efficiency initiatives, while involvement of general top managers without an operational role has little or no effect. Involvement of top operations managers increases the percentage of recommended energy savings that are implemented by 13.4% on average and increases the probability of adoption of more disruptive individual recommendations related to process and equipment change from 31% to 44%. Our findings imply that, in order to advance energy efficiency in SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), it may be advisable to target managers who are sufficiently senior but still in a clearly operationally-focused position.

In many manufacturing operations, profitable energy efficiency opportunities remain unexploited. While previous studies have tried to explain the underinvestment, we focus on how the way in which a portfolio of opportunities is presented in a list affects adoption decisions. We use information on over 100,000 energy saving recommendations made to more than 13,000 small and medium-sized manufacturing firms under the Industrial Assessment Centers (IAC) program of the US Department of Energy (DOE).We find that adoption rates are higher for initiatives appearing early in a list of recommendations. This sequence effect is consistent and large: simply moving a recommendation one position lower has the same effect on average as increasing upfront implementation cost by at least 17% from the average value. Given this impact of sequence on adoption of individual recommendations, we utilize variations within our data to examine how various sequencing approaches affect adoption at the portfolio level. Sequences in which recommendations are listed from best to worst payback achieve higher potential energy savings given the investments in energy efficiency made by the firms. We also observe a choice overload effect at the portfolio level, but the magnitude of this effect is small.

We examine the role of signaling and of intrinsic benefits in the adoption of the individual elements of the voluntary LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards for green buildings. We use goodness-of-fit tests on data for all 442 LEED certified buildings and find that neither signaling nor pursuit of intrinsic benefits can independently explain the observed adoption pattern, but that a combination of the two factors can. We also find tentative evidence that the adoption decision is made sequentially: organizations first choose a level of certification (consistent with signaling), and then choose how many LEED elements to adopt given their chosen level of certification (consistent with pursuing intrinsic benefits). We relate our findings to some open questions in the literature on diffusion of technology and draw implications for the design and the future development of similar voluntary standards and eco-labels.