Determinants of Environmental Profit: An Analysis of the Firm-Level Relationshipbetween Environmental Performance and Economic Performance

摘要

The study contains a theoretical and empirical examination of the relationshipbetween the environmental and economic performance of firms. It reframes the crucial question to read, not whether, but when environmental performance improvements are profitable for firms. The study develops the novel concept of environmental profit and investigates its determinants. To this end, the study first reviews the existing literature to show how and why attempts to detect a systematic relationship between the environmental and economic performance of firms have been unsuccessful. In particular, the study identifies three gaps in the previous knowledge: (1) the relationship may not be constant across environmental performance levels, which means that it needs to be considered a function of environmental performance; (2) the relationship may not be uniform across cases, which means that the determinants of environmental profit need to be identified; and (3) the relationship may not be static across time, which means that changes in the determinants of environmental profit over time need to be discussed.