Legal Origins, Corporate Governance, and Environmental Outcomes

Environmental governance has emerged as a recent perspective to explain the link between corporate governance mechanisms and environmental performance such as pollution reduction. We extend current models by incorporating the crucial role of the underlying institutional logics in terms of an a priori focus on either shareholder rights or stakeholder inclusion, which, in turn, can be traced back to the legal origin of a specific country. Using data on a sample of common and civil law countries, we find support for our predictions that a shareholder-focused common law legal origin is associated with significantly higher emissions of CO₂, and also that international environmental agreements like the Kyoto protocol seem to have a more pronounced effect in shareholder-centric economies than thus far assumed.