Environmental shareholder value. Economic success with corporate environmental management

The links between corporate environmental protection and economic success have been analysed vigorously in several theoretical and empirical studies. Most studies are based on the hypothesis that the amount of environmental protection is somehow - negatively or positively - correlated with the economic success of the company. We argue that the amount of corporate environmental protection per se neither spurs nor reduces shareholder value, which is maybe the most important measure of economic success at present. Moreover, the effect environmental protection exerts on shareholder value is determined by the manner in which corporate environmental management is practised. Referring to the value drivers of shareholder value, we discuss the characteristics necessary to increase shareholder value, or at least to contain any reduction as effectively as possible.

The impact of equity markets and corporate governance on labour market flexibility

Drawing from various literatures, this article explores links between equity markets and labour market flexibility. Various data sources are used to test relationships for a set of OECD countries, controlling for other likely influences on flexibility such as government and industrial relations institutions. The results are generally supportive as regards employment flexibility: equity market trading activity is associated with shorter job tenure, higher activity rates, and greater employment change over the cycle. However, the relationship between equity markets and pay flexibility is less statistically robust to the addition of controls.

Understanding Corporate Governance Reform in South Africa: Anglo-American Divergence, the King Reports and Hybridization

This article investigates corporate governance reform in South Africa in the context of the country’s international links with Anglo-American corporate governance and domestic pursuit of socioeconomic development. Two key questions are evaluated. (a) How has divergence within the Anglo-American model influenced corporate governance reform in South Africa? (b) Can South Africa’s historical closeness to the Anglo-American model be combined with increasing attention to stakeholder issues to produce a hybrid “African model” of corporate governance? Evaluating these questions, the following issues are explored in turn: the contrast between shareholder and stakeholder models, divergence between U.S. and U.K. approaches to corporate governance as exemplified by Sarbanes-Oxley, locating a South African approach in context of the Anglo-American model, the King reports and an emerging “African” model of corporate governance, and the role of international and domestic factors in shaping South Africa’s ongoing reform process.

Opportunity cost based analysis of corporate eco-efficiency: A methodology and its application to the CO2-efficiency of German companies

In this paper, we propose the return-to-cost-ratio (RCR) as an alternative approach to the analysis of operational eco-efficiency of companies based on the notion of opportunity costs. RCR helps to overcome two fundamental deficits of existing approaches to eco-efficiency. (1) It translates eco-efficiency into managerial terms by applying the well-established notion of opportunity costs to eco-efficiency analysis. (2) RCR allows to identify and quantify the drivers behind changes in corporate eco-efficiency. RCR is applied to the analysis of the CO2-efficiency of German companies in order to illustrate its usefulness for a detailed analysis of changes in corporate eco-efficiency as well as for the development of effective environmental strategies. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The ‘Public Interest’ Agency of International Organizations? The case of the OECD Principles of Corporate Governance

This article seeks to outline and explore some of the conditions necessary for International Organizations (IOs) to perform in a public interest fashion through a case study of the Principles of corporate governance formulated by the OECD. Rather than the more commonly documented pathological and dysfunctional behavioural forms of IOs, the case of the Principles, both in their formulation by the OECD, and in their assessment by the World Bank through the ROSC process, represent an episode of IO agency protecting and promoting a wider public interest. In exercising their agency, IO staff, have made the Principles more agreeable to a wider range of interested parties, giving them a general interest orientation, in accordance with a proceduralist definition of public interest. This case should therefore encourage IPE scholars to consider carefully and systematically the sets of circumstances and conditions, which might be required for IO agency to take more socially useful forms. In the final section, three indicators are identified which might be evaluated in future research into the positive public interest agency of IOs across a range of cases.