The impact of corporate environmental responsibility on financial performance: perspective from the multinational extractive sector

Abstract

The research into the relationship between social-environmental responsibility and financial performance continues to draw the attention of both scholars and practitioners. This is because previous studies have not presented an unequivocal outcome as to the direction of causation between the two constructs. To address this obvious gap, this study explores the relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and financial performance with a focus on the extractive sector where previous studies least investigated empirically and one of the worst culprits in environmental degradation. The study explores the impact of corporate environmental responsibility on the financial performance in the extractive sector using a pooled secondary data of 101 multinational extractive companies for the period of 2008-2010 and primary data from a survey of 275 extractive sector managers. The results of this study show that there is no relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and financial performance while the environmental attitude of managers is positively related to the perceived corporate reputation of their companies. A further investigation shows that sector unique characteristics are responsible for the neutral relationship between corporate environmental responsibility and financial performance. However, some results show statistically insignificant positive relation and this points to the fact that in the long-term, poor sensitivity to the environment may not be sustainable.