Do we care about sustainability? An analysis of time sensitivity of social preferences under environmental time-persistent effects

Abstract

Environmental cost-benefit analysis has traditionally assumed that the value of benefits is sensitive to their timing and that outcomes are valued higher, the sooner in time they occur following implementation of a project or policy. Though, this assumption might have important implications especially for the social desirability of interventions aiming at counteracting time-persistent environmental problems, whose impacts occur in the longand very long-term, respectively involving the present and future generations. This study analyzes the time sensitivity of social preferences for preservation policies of adaptation to climate change stresses. Results show that stated preferences are time insensitive, due to sustainability issues: individuals show insignificant differences in benefits they can experience within their own lifetimes compared to those which occur in the longer term, and which will instead be enjoyed by future generations. Whilst these results may be specific to the experimental design employed here, they do raise interesting questions regarding choices over time-persistent environmental problems, particularly in terms of the desirability of interventions which produce longer-term benefits.

Environment Practices Mediating the Environmental Compliance and firm Performance: An Institutional Theory Perspective from Emerging Economies

“…These reported findings are relevant because China and How and which environmental practices positively affect different performance dimensions were investigated further. Controlled water and electricity consumption directly adds to the financial benefits (Chang, 2015;Faccioli et al, 2016;Tan et al, 2017). It is apparent that when firms take measures to reduce CO 2 emissions, adopt waste management and recycling practices (Sarkis et al, 2010), this adds to the operations performance (Dai et al, 2017).…”

“…Environmental measures have also been studied in different functional contexts, viz green supply chain management (Orr & Jadhav, 2018;Zarei et al, 2019), customer service, etc. Faccioli et al (2016), Gotschol et al (2014) presents that the benefits of the firm's environmental actions are long-term in nature. Improved communication between firms and their key stakeholders (Ko et al, 2013) becomes the firms' marketing capability and results in long-term profitability.…”

“…Based on our literature review, we find limited studies (Gupta & Gupta, 2020a) to assess environmental practices' impact on a wide range of firm performance dimensions. Various scholars study the performance in different functional contexts such as financial (Faccioli et al, 2016;Tan et al, 2017), the customer (Radhouane et al, 2018), operations (Dai et al, 2017), human resources (Liao et al, 2011;Lyu et al, 2018), health and safety context (Wiengarten et al, 2017), innovation and new product development (Gupta & Gupta, 2019), the dimension of innovation (Gupta, 2021), etc.…”

The sustainability reporting-firm performance nexus: evidence from a threshold model

“…In other words, probably, a particular association (positive or negative) between study variables holds up to a certain threshold, which gets reversed or insignificant beyond the threshold. Also, few studies (for instance, Gotschol et al, 2014;Faccioli et al, 2016;Jo et al, 2015) find that ESG investment positively impacts the firm performance only in the long run. In the same vein, Zhao and Murrell (2016) and Testa and D'Amato (2017) find that any ESG investment negatively affects the firm performance in the beginning.…”

Economic valuation of ecosystem goods and services: a review for decision makers

“…National governments and international institutions typically have a standard rate to ensure consistent discounting across all public sector appraisals (European Commission, 2015; HMT, 2018). Some argue that discounting is inappropriate for long-term, significant environmental changes (Stern, Peters et al, 2006, Saez and Requena, 2007, Stern and Taylor, 2007, Faccioli, Hanley et al, 2016 because the standard discount rates of a few percent result in huge discounting of long-term impactswhich for climate policy, for example, could justify a "wait and see" approach. Some advocate declining or hyperbolic discount rates (Kirby, 1997), others a low constant rate.…”