文档介绍：外文文献翻译
原文:
Voluntary Corporate Environmental Initiatives
and Shareholder Wealth
Researchers debate whether environmental investments reduce firm value or actually improve financial performance. We provide pelling evidence on shareholder wealth effects of membership in voluntary environmental programs (VEPs). Companies announcing membership in EPA’s Climate Leaders, a program targeting reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, experience significantly negative abnormal stock returns. The price decline is larger in firms with poor corporate governance structures, and for high market-to-book (., high growth) firms. However, firms joining Ceres, a program involving more general mitments, have insignificant announcement returns, as do portfolios of industry rivals. Overall, mitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions appear to conflict with firm value-maximization. This has important implications for policies that rely on voluntary initiatives to address climate change. Further, we find that firms tend to join Climate Leaders either in response to climate-related shareholder resolutions or due to weak corporate governance standards which give managers the discretion to make such voluntary environmentally responsible investment decisions—decisions that may result in lower firm value.
Introduction
A rapidly growing corporate trend in recent years, that has many taking notice, is the number panies engaged in voluntary environmentally responsible (VER) activities. These activities span a wide range, including membership in public voluntary programs that encourage pollution reductions, unilateral efforts panies to improve their environmental performance, and the voluntary public disclosure of environmental performance measures (Khanna, 2001). With this trend, a growing number of people are asking whether better environmental performance translates into higher financial performance. Corporate investments in environmental technologies have traditionally been considered a