Who Needs To Be Seen To Be Green? How Reputational Pressure Affects Responses To Climate Change
Domestic and international laws have been slow and ineffective at regulating firms in response to climate change. For this reason, voluntary self-regulation and private regulatory bodies have become increasingly important. Despite claims that firms oppose costly carbon mitigation strategies, previous research has shown variation in the extent to which firms signal their performance on climate change. What explains this variation? I develop a four-pronged theory of reputational pressure to answer this question.