Abstract
With the development of society and the improvement of environmental consciousness, the performance of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) has elicited increasing attention in recent years. In previous studies, the exploration of the antecedents of CER is far less evident than the exploration of its results, and only few studies have investigated what determines CER engagement from the perspective of supply chain concentration (SCC). Using data from 2413 firms in China from 2013 to 2019, our study uses the fixed effect model and performs multiple robustness tests to examine the impact of SCC on the fulfillment of CER, its transmission mechanism, and the moderating role of technology uncertainty (TU). Empirical results show that SCC has a pivotal negative impact on CER performance, wherein both supplier concentration (SUP) and customer concentration (CUS) are detrimental to CER performance. Further mechanism analysis shows that such negative effect can be explained by the adverse effect of SCC on the operating cash flow (OCF), in which OCF has a partial mediating effect. Moreover, the negative impact of SCC on CER performance is more significant when the uncertainty of firms’ technological environment is stronger. Our study opens the transmission “black box” between SCC and CER performance and incorporates the behaviors of firms, inter-firm relationships, and environmental factors into the same research framework, and provides a theoretical guidance for management practices.
Highlights
With the recent intensification of environmental problems such as the depletion of natural resources, air pollution, water pollution and shortage, and soil erosion, the balance between environmental protection and economic development has attracted worldwide attention, and both green economy and sustainable development have gradually become the future economic development directions of all countries in the world
Our study focuses on the relationship between supply chain concentration (SCC) and corporate environmental responsibility (CER) performance and explores the related impact mechanism
We find that the exploration of CER antecedents is still lacking in the supply chain perspective, that prior studies on firm-level outcomes of SCC focus on financial and operating decisions, and that the conclusions are inconsistent
Summary
With the recent intensification of environmental problems such as the depletion of natural resources, air pollution, water pollution and shortage, and soil erosion, the balance between environmental protection and economic development has attracted worldwide attention, and both green economy and sustainable development have gradually become the future economic development directions of all countries in the world. This study explores the relationship between SCC and CER and its transmission mechanism by applying fixed effect models and conducting various robustness tests using a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2013 to 2019. In this way, the research framework of “Supply Chain Concentration—Operating Cash Flow—Corporate. Previous studies on the driving factors of CER have mostly focused on institutional factors, external pressures, company-specific factors, and managerial characteristics [2,5,17], yet have ignored the impact of SCC on CER from the supply chain perspective.
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