Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Business Administration

First Advisor's Name

Sumit K. Kundu

First Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Chair

Second Advisor's Name

Karen Paul

Third Advisor's Name

Ronaldo Parente

Fourth Advisor's Name

Florence George

Keywords

Environmental performance, climate change strategy, climate change

Date of Defense

6-30-2014

Abstract

In the context of distinctive international business phenomena of global environmental concern i.e., climate change, this dissertation addresses two research questions. Does multinational enterprise (MNE) orientation (global- or regional-orientation) have an influence on the carbon performance of the multinational? Is there any significant home country effect that drives carbon performance?

Stakeholders are increasingly watching the green performance of the firms and investors are looking for information of how firms deal with externalities such as carbon emission. Environmental capabilities are increasingly becoming the core competence of a multinational enterprise. This also enables the MNE to be an active entity and play a key role in global environmental governance. Defining carbon performance as the capability of firms to integrate climate change strategy into the overall strategy, this dissertation used resource-based view and institutional theory as the theoretical framework along with the concept of regionalization of firms. We argue that differences in integrating strategy to reduce carbon emission (carbon performance) are related to MNE orientation and home country effect. Using a sample of 324 firm-years drawn from the carbon disclosure project reports 2011, 2012, and 2013, we analyzed the data running a logistic regression. We found that global-oriented MNEs had better carbon performance compared with regional-oriented MNEs (p

This result was against the hypothesized relationship. One of the reasons for this result could be projected good image by the firms in environmentally non-sensitive industries because of cost advantage. Lower environmental institutional distance between home and host country of a firm increased the likelihood of its carbon performance regardless of its orientation as global or regional (p

Identifier

FI14071142

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