Climate Change Policy, Economics, and Governance
My multidisciplinary research in this area--bridging the fields of economics, political science, and management--speaks to several audiences: economists, political scientists, and management and policy scholars. Under my mentorship, undergraduate and graduate students have helped to collect and code a plethora of data to track a census of global businesses' climate mitigation and performance over time and across scales of governance, sectors, and markets.
My research in this area investigates the various and interacting roles that different levels of governance have played in inducing and shaping corporate environmental behavior. In particular, I have explored the effects of the interactions between micro (e.g., firm’s internal managerial capabilities) and macro (e.g., domestic and global economy and governance) incentives and constraints on firm behavior.
My publications on firm responses to global climate change are listed here.
My forthcoming MIT Press book, Corporations at Climate Crossroads: Multilevel Governance, Public Policy, and Global Climate Action, asks why and how the world’s largest corporations have taken proactive action on climate change during the years leading up to and after the Paris Agreement. To investigate the demand for, and supply of, global businesses’ climate mitigation, across sectors, and in developed and developing countries, Corporations at Climate Crossroads bridges economics, political science, and management approaches to develop a new theory whereby corporations and managerial and executive leaders inside them are key players in a nested structure of climate change governance with interactions between bottom-up and top-down processes involving firm, regulatory, and global governance. This book’s Multilevel Governance Framework on Climate Change is substantiated by large-N statistical analyses (with attention to causal inference) of global businesses’ climate disclosure, mitigation, and carbon emissions between 2011 and 2020. Empirical analysis identifies corporate climate leadership from superficial greenwashing practices by distinguishing firms’ decision to engage in and their actual level of effort in climate mitigation. Illustrative company cases underscore the internal firm and external political economy factors that motivate some global businesses but not others to engage in corporate self-regulation on climate change.