An examination of corporate reporting, environmental management practices and firm performance

TLDR

Environmental management practices have attracted growing interest, yet prior research has examined only a limited set of practices using traditional data sources. This study aims to use an innovative data source and a broader set of EMPs to examine their relationship with firm performance. The authors collected environmental and business performance data from 45 corporate reports via content analysis and applied a two‑step canonical correlation analysis to investigate EMP–performance relationships. The analysis confirms that environmental management practices are positively associated with firm performance, consistent with prior findings.

Abstract

Abstract Despite the growing interest in environmental management practices (EMPs), research to date has typically analyzed a limited range of these practices and used traditional data sources. In contrast, this paper uses an innovative data source to explore EMPs. We use a more comprehensive set of the practices than prior works in order to test relationships between EMPs and firm performance. The data used in this study comprised environmental and business performance data from 45 corporate reports. Content analysis is used to gather the data and canonical correlation is used for analysis in a two‐step process in order to explore the relationships between EMPs and performance measures. Results support previously posited relationships based on traditional data and indicate that EMPs are associated with firm performance.