Does Supply Chain Concentration Affect the Performance of Corporate Environmental Responsibility? The Moderating Effect of Technology Uncertainty

Tingli Liu and Hongqiao Gao
Additional contact information
Tingli Liu: College of Economics and Business Administration, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing 100124, China
Hongqiao Gao: Economics and Management College, Civil Aviation University of China, Tianjin 300300, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-19

Abstract: With the development of society and the improvement of environmental consciousness, the performance of corporate environmental responsibility (CER) has elicited increasing attention in recent years. In previous studies, the exploration of the antecedents of CER is far less evident than the exploration of its results, and only few studies have investigated what determines CER engagement from the perspective of supply chain concentration (SCC). Using data from 2413 firms in China from 2013 to 2019, our study uses the fixed effect model and performs multiple robustness tests to examine the impact of SCC on the fulfillment of CER, its transmission mechanism, and the moderating role of technology uncertainty (TU). Empirical results show that SCC has a pivotal negative impact on CER performance, wherein both supplier concentration (SUP) and customer concentration (CUS) are detrimental to CER performance. Further mechanism analysis shows that such negative effect can be explained by the adverse effect of SCC on the operating cash flow (OCF), in which OCF has a partial mediating effect. Moreover, the negative impact of SCC on CER performance is more significant when the uncertainty of firms’ technological environment is stronger. Our study opens the transmission “black box” between SCC and CER performance and incorporates the behaviors of firms, inter-firm relationships, and environmental factors into the same research framework, and provides a theoretical guidance for management practices.

Keywords: supply chain concentration; corporate environmental responsibility; operating cash flow; technology uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/2/781/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/2/781/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:2:p:781-:d:722220

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().