In response to stakeholders' growing concerns, firms are joining self-regulatory environmental programs to signal their superior environmental management capabilities. In contrast to the literature's focus on programs featuring third-party certification, we theorize that programs lacking...

To assess and manage reputational risks associated with supply chains, buyers are increasingly seeking information about their suppliers’ labor and environmental performance. Several voluntary programs have arisen to encourage suppliers to report this information in a standardized manner, but...

We study how government green procurement policies influence private-sector demand for similar products. Specifically, we measure the impact of municipal policies requiring governments to construct green buildings on private-sector adoption of the US Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy...

Competition among firms can have many positive outcomes, including decreased prices and improved quality. Yet competition can have a darker side when firms can gain competitive advantage through illicit and corrupt activities. In this paper, we argue that competition can lead organizations to...

A broad literature has emerged over the past decades demonstrating that firms' environmental strategies and practices are influenced by stakeholders and institutional pressures. Such findings are consistent with institutional sociology, which emphasizes the importance of regulatory, normative...

Governments and other organizations often outsource activities to achieve cost savings from market competition. Yet such benefits are often accompanied by poor quality resulting from moral hazard, which can be particularly onerous when outsourcing the monitoring and enforcement of government...

Process-improvement ideas often come from frontline workers who speak up by voicing concerns about problems and by taking charge to resolve them. We hypothesize that organization-wide process-improvement campaigns encourage both forms of speaking up, especially voicing concern. We also...

Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We identify key company- and country-level factors that, by intensifying scrutiny on firms and...

Firms reliant on supply chains to manufacture their goods risk reputational harm if the working conditions in those factories are revealed to be dangerous, illegal, or otherwise problematic. While firms are increasingly relying on private-sector "social auditors" to assess factory conditions,...

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy implications. This chapter...