Firms may underinvest in local environmental protection even from the private viewpoint of its owners and employees, but works councils may help mitigate this problem. We show that increases in environmental investments when councils are present could be employee-led, firm-led, or jointly-led....

This paper deals with a special type of voluntary approach to protect the environment, for example, that we would like to term voluntary commitment. Its major characteristic is that it represents a unilateral declaration without a decisively active role of regulators. In other words, voluntary...