Three essays on environmental, social, and governance

Pang-Li Chen

doi:10.17918/00001697

This dissertation seeks to deepen our understanding of environmental, social, and governance issues in finance. The first essay relates to the "E" component of ESG. It studies the consequences of an environmental reform that aims to make industrial land more redeployable by limiting purchasers' liability for past pollution. Existing research shows that strengthening liability for shareholders and creditors lessens their incentives to monitor the polluting firm, leading to worse environmental outcomes. Unlike shareholders and creditors, purchasers do not possess such "monitoring technology." However, purchaser liability can significantly affect corporate environmental activity by influencing the industrial land market. Thus, I investigate how purchaser liability influences industrial firms' pollution behavior in this essay. A fundamental concept in finance known as risk shifting suggests that companies engage in harm-shifting behavior when limited liability is more likely to bind. This means an inherent moral hazard problem is associated with financially distressed: distressed firms underinvest in pollution abatement because they are not responsible for the full cost of cleaning up environmental contamination. I conjecture that strengthening liability protection for purchasers mitigates this moral hazard problem by increasing the liquidity of industrial land. I empirically test this prediction using a difference-in-difference empirical design and detailed plant-level data. Consistent with this conjecture, I show that stronger liability protection for purchasers comes with substantial benefits of facilitating the trades of industrial land. Moreover, firms reduced pollution at treated plants following the reform. Importantly, the reduction is driven by financially distressed firms. My findings highlight a novel environmental benefit associated with reducing purchaser liability. The second essay studies the incentives of people that enforce environmental regulation. In particular, we explore how the government's incentive scheme impacts regulatory risk and pollution choices by regulated plants. We hypothesize that higher pay gaps between EPA attorneys and their superiors increase the monetary value of a promotion, which stimulates them to put more effort into enforcement activities. We test this prediction using a novel dataset on human resource data of all EPA attorneys between 1996 and 2016. We find that higher pay gaps among EPA attorneys increase the quantity and quality of enforcement cases. Moreover, we show that polluting firms respond to this heightened regulatory risk by reducing pollution and production. This paper highlights the cost and benefits of using the government's pay scheme to incentivize environmental regulators. The final essay relates to the "G" component of ESG. I show that boards rely on heuristics (i.e., rules-of-thumb) to allocate their monitoring efforts across their directorship firms. Classic theory on CEO turnover predicts that CEOs are more likely to be fired for performance when the board monitors the firm more intensely. Consistent with this prediction, I find that CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is positively associated with the fraction of directors for whom the current firm is the worst performer among their directorship firms. I argue this finding is consistent with boards using rank-dependent heuristics to allocate their monitoring effort. To bolster this interpretation, I show that directors are less likely to miss their worst-performing firm's board meetings compared to other directorship firms. Furthermore, the effect on CEO turnover-performance sensitivity is driven by board members responsible for monitoring the CEO, such as those sitting on monitoring committees. Finally, I show that relying on rank-dependent heuristics to allocate monitoring efforts leads to inefficient firing decisions. Overall, this essay documents an unknown cost of board interlock: firms that perform poorly relative to their director interlocks are subject to inefficient monitoring.

Three essays on environmental, social, and governance

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Three essays on environmental, social, and governance

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