The Volkswagen emissions scandal began in 2015, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that diesel cars produced by Volkswagen from 2009 through 2015 were in violation of emissions ...standards. The authors analyze the impact of this announcement on transaction prices for Volkswagen cars on the U.S. eBay Motors. The main focus is on Volkswagen cars other than the 2009–2015 diesel models—namely, vehicles that did not violate agency standards, enabling an assessment of whether the negative shock received by the emissions standards violators spilled over to other Volkswagen models that were in compliance. The difference-in-differences results show that final bid prices declined after the announcement by 14% for nonviolating diesel cars and 9% for nonviolating gasoline cars. The analysis also provides little evidence of considerable changes in the numbers of participating bidders, bidding strategies, numbers of listings, and reserve-price strategies, suggesting that the drops in prices likely resulted from lowered willingness to pay from buyers.
The purpose of this study is to determine the ways in which the religiosity of a firm’s CEO affects his/her firm’s green initiatives. Previous research on corporate green initiatives offers limited ...insights into the micro-foundations of such behaviors. From an upper echelon perspective, we argue that CEOs with religiosity are more likely to engage in corporate green initiatives, because they hold higher perceptions about being monitored to fulfill religious role expectations, driving individuals to maintain public goods. Furthermore, this positive impact of CEOs’ religiosity is weaker when he/she uses participative decision-making processes. We examine a sample of 1184 small- and medium-sized manufacturers in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Using latent class modeling, we classify respondent CEOs’ religious belief systems into eight classes and find general support for the hypothesized relationships. Our findings contribute to the upper echelon and corporate social responsibility literature by revealing the missing link between a CEO’s religiosity and his/her firm’s corporate green initiatives.
•ISO 14001's effectiveness at reducing pollution varies across countries.•ISO 14001's effectiveness at reducing pollution varies across environmental impact.•Standard instrumentation approaches to ...address endogeneity may not be sufficient.•ISO 14001 may be more effective when there are clear cost-saving opportunities.•ISO 14001 may be more effective at reducing indirectly regulated impacts.
Using Japanese facility-level data, we estimate the effects of ISO 14001 certification on the promotion of more advanced practices, namely green supply chain management (GSCM). Our results show that ...ISO 14001 promotes GSCM practices. Facilities with environmental management systems (EMS) certified to ISO 14001 are 40% more likely to assess their suppliers' environmental performance and 50% more likely to require that their suppliers undertake specific environmental practices. Further, government programs that encourage voluntary EMS adoption indirectly promote GSCM practices. These programs increase the probabilities that facilities will assess their suppliers' environmental performance and require suppliers to undertake specific environmental practices by 7% and 8%, respectively. Combined, these findings suggest that there may be significant but previously unnoticed spillover effects of ISO 14001 and government promotion of voluntary action.
We investigate the accuracy of the perceptions of health risks in India. The context of our study is the risk of developing physical symptoms related to household air pollution caused by cooking. ...Using field data collected from 588 respondents in 17 villages in West Bengal, we regress the probability of symptoms on fuel choices to predict respondent-specific health risk changes. The estimated risks, which we treat as objective risks, are then compared with the corresponding subjective probabilistic beliefs, which are elicited by an interactive method with visual aids. Our results show that, on average, the respondents slightly underestimate the change in risk when switching from cooking with firewood to cooking with liquefied petroleum gas, even though their beliefs are qualitatively correct. The results further show that risk misperception is associated only with religion among individuals’ observed characteristics, suggesting that their unobserved characteristics play a substantial role in risk misperception.
•We assess the accuracy of subjective beliefs regarding health risks in India.•Pairs of estimated risks and subjective beliefs are obtained for 588 individuals.•We adopt an interactive method using visual aids to elicit subjective beliefs.•We find underestimation of the change in risk when switching from firewood to LPG.•Risk misperception is correlated with religion.
To reduce their environmental impacts, a growing number of organizations worldwide have implemented environmental management systems (EMSs). In these organizations, energy conservation activities ...become usual behaviors for employees; thus, we hypothesize that employees continue such energy saving behaviors at home. This hypothesis is supported by data from surveys of individuals in Japan. Specifically, we find that the probability of engaging in energy saving practices at home is higher and that expenditures on electricity use are lower for individuals who work in organizations that implement EMSs than for individuals who do not work in organizations with EMSs. Our results suggest that beyond the original purpose of helping organizations reduce their environmental impacts, EMSs work as an intervention to promote household energy saving.
Contourites are well-known from many continental margins under the influence of bottom currents but have been little reported from the Pacific Ocean. This paper documents a new area of ...contourite-controlled sedimentation in the NW Pacific Ocean, which we call the Ryukyu Sand Sheet. This contourite sand sheet has an area of around 35,000 km2 and extends from the narrow island shelves to over 1500 m water depth. It comprises mainly moderate to well-sorted fine-grained sands, with current ripples and giant sediment waves and is also associated with small drifts. It is formed under the influence of three principal current systems – the Kuroshio Current, the Kuroshio Countercurrent and the Ryukyu Current. The interaction of these currents with each other and with a complex seafloor topography, spawns a series of meso-scale gyres, eddies and vortices that shape the seafloor and lead to deposition of an extensive sandy substrate, locally with gravels and exposed seafloor. Strong surface currents, as well as deep-water thermohaline circulation, both influence the depositional and erosional processes of deep-sea sediments. The role of the modern Kuroshio Current in this context supports earlier work that proposed an ancestral Kuroshio Current for the deposition of Miocene contourites onshore Japan. Sediment supply to the Ryukyu Sand Sheet is by a mixed process of seafloor polishing and sand spillover that involves combined oceanographic and gravitational processes.
•A new area of contourite-controlled sedimentation in the NW Pacific is documented.•The vast extent of the sand sheet comprises current ripples and giant sediment waves.•The Kuroshio Current with associated currents influence the formation of contourite.•Sediment supply to the area is by seafloor polishing and sand spillover process.
How do donor countries determine foreign aid allocation? The literature seems to agree that institutional quality could be a possible determinant. However, no study has found any decisive variable to ...represent this factor. Recently, an increasing number of countries, developed as well as developing, have been adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) as a single set of high-quality global accounting standards. IFRS aims to generate accurate financial information and to remove information asymmetry, thereby potentially improving corporate governance and performance in firms. We hypothesize that donors allocate more aid to mandatory IFRS-adopting recipients than nonadopting ones, expecting higher aid effectiveness in the recipients. Our bilateral panel data analysis on commitment flows between 28 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors and more than 90 recipients shows that, upon mandatory IFRS adoption by a recipient, donors increase the amount of aid by approximately 20%.
•We investigate the effect of a recipient's accounting standards on a donor's aid allocation.•We focus on the status of global IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) adoption.•We use bilateral panel data on commitment flows between 28 DAC (Development Assistance Committee) donors and more than 90 recipients.•Donors allocate more aid to mandatory adopting recipients than non-adopting ones.•The amount of aid increases one year after the adoption and, thereafter, does not revert over time.
•Individuals’ expectations of health risks influence their dirty cooking fuel use.•Increased dirty fuel usage, in turn, degrades the health of the individuals.•The reduction of dirty fuel usage by ...information provision may be small in size.
An increasing number of empirical studies have investigated the determinants of cooking fuel choice in developing countries, where health risks from household air pollution are one of the most important issues. We contribute to this stream of literature by examining individuals’ subjective probabilistic expectations about health risks when using different types of fuel and their role in cooking fuel usage patterns. We also explore how these patterns, in turn, are associated with health status. Using data collected from 557 rural Indian households, we find that subjective probabilistic expectations of becoming sick from dirty fuel usage are negatively and significantly associated with the fraction of days of dirty fuel usage in households. Concurrently, dirty fuel usage and self-reported health status of the individual being sick are also significantly correlated. We then conduct a policy simulation of information provision regarding the health risks of dirty fuel usage. Our simulation demonstrates that although the provision of information results in statistically significant changes in households’ cooking fuel usage patterns and in individuals’ health status, these changes may be small in size.
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