Sustainable entrepreneurship: When does environmental compliance improve corporate performance?
研究了中国企业数据，发现环境合规同时降低市场绩效但提升财务绩效，且企业规模和所有权会影响市场绩效，碳强度高低则分别影响市场与财务绩效。
Abstract Concerted effort to reduce ecological damages requires that the role of enterprises should be extended to incorporate environmental issues into their core business objectives. Despite huge developments in sustainable entrepreneurship research, outcomes of sustainable entrepreneurship uptake remain largely unclear. Drawing on data of Chinese firms, and utilizing fixed effects regression, our paper evaluates the conditions under which compliance with environmental regulation may enable or constrain corporate performance. We find that environmental compliance lowers corporate market performance and improves financial performance at the same time. We also find that the decline in market performance is reversed for large and privately owned enterprises, highlighting the role of firm size and ownership in corporate performance. When distinguishing between market‐ and financial performance, our evidence shows that environmental compliance will most likely improve market performance when enterprise carbon intensity level is low and improve financial performance when enterprise carbon intensity level is high. As we have discussed in our paper, these results have several implications from the point of view of managers, firm stakeholders, and policymakers.