Carbon emissions, corporate governance, and hostile takeover threats
利用基于州立法的收购脆弱性指标，研究发现收购威胁越大，企业减少碳排放的努力越显著，收购市场作为外部治理机制促使管理者采取长期有利于股东的政策。
Abstract Exploiting a unique measure of takeover vulnerability principally based on state legislations, we investigate how corporate carbon reduction efforts are influenced by the takeover market, which is widely regarded as a crucial instrument of external corporate governance. Our results show that more takeover exposure brings about significantly greater efforts to reduce carbon emissions. A rise in takeover susceptibility by one standard deviation improves carbon reduction performance by 12.81%. The findings corroborate the notion that the takeover market, acting as an external governance mechanism, compels managers to adopt policies that benefit shareholders in the long run. Our results imply that carbon emissions are a crucial corporate outcome as it is subject to the pressure from the takeover market. Companies should pay a close attention to this matter. Further analysis robustly validates the results, including propensity score matching, entropy balancing, an instrumental variable analysis, and heteroscedastic identification. Our measure of takeover vulnerability is plausibly exogenous and thus probably reveals a causal effect, rather than a mere association.