Sustainability and firm performance : evidence from corportate and farm level

This thesis approaches the question of sustainability and firm performance. In the contemporary business model, firm performance measurement must take into account not only economic profits, but also environmental and social issues, in order to ensure the sustainable development of the firm. By using advanced methodological approaches and exploring sustainability through a holistic view, this thesis contributes significantly to sustainability performance literature. Three specific objectives have been fulfilled through three papers that constitute the main body of the present thesis. The first article aims to answer whether profitable business is compatible with balanced sustainability by investigating the relationship between the economic, social, environmental and governance performance for a sample of global firms. A canonical vine (C-vine) copula is used for this purpose. Results show the existence of a fairly strong positive relationship between economic, social and environmental performance. The corporate governance dimension is shown to have a weak relationship with the rest of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) dimensions. Important policy implications are derived from these results. The second paper investigates the relationships among performance dimensions associated with corporate social responsibility focusing on the U.S. electric utility sector. Results of a statistical copula approach suggest that economic performance of utilities is compatible with environmental, social, and governance performance. The CSR model has the potential to help U.S. electric utilities become better corporate citizens while also obtaining higher economic profits. The third paper investigates farms’ stochastic production technology as the interaction of three-main types of sub-technologies that govern, respectively, the production of agricultural commodities, environmental pollution, and social outputs of agricultural activities. The model is empirically implemented through a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model. The empirical application is based on a survey of Catalan arable crop farms. On average, we find our sample farms to display high technical and social performance, while they show relatively poor environmental performance.