What Determines the Decision to Implement EMAS? A European Firm Level Study

Roeland Bracke (), Tom Verbeke () and Veerle Dejonkheere ()
Additional contact information
Roeland Bracke: Centre for Environmental Economics and Management, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Tom Verbeke: Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel (HUB), Belgium
Veerle Dejonkheere: Laboratory of Food Technology and Engineering, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium

No 2008/15, Working Papers from Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Faculteit Economie en Management

Abstract: Empirical research on the characteristics of environmentally responsive companies has focussed on US and Japanese companies. For Europe, which is commonly considered as the greenest of the three major markets, similar research is lacking. This paper seeks to fill this gap by empirically investigating business and financial characteristics, stakeholder pressures and public policies to distinguish companies that have implemented the European Eco-Management and Audit System (EMAS) from a unique firm-level dataset of European publicly quoted companies. We find that the EMAS participation decision is positively influenced by the solvency ratio, the share of non-current liabilities, the average labour cost and the absolute company size as well as the relative size of a company compared to its sector average. The profit margin exerts a negative influence. We further find that companies whose headquarters is located in a country that actively encourages EMAS have a higher probability of participation. Finally, this paper suggests that rather than attracting other kinds of companies, a favourable institutional context succeeds in convincing more of the same kind of companies to participate.

Keywords: Business and financial characteristics; EMAS participation; Logistic regression; Stakeholder pressures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2008-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published in Environmental and Resource Economics, Vol. 41(4), pp. 499-518

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10640-008-9207-y published version (application/pdf)

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:hub:wpecon:200815

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel, Faculteit Economie en Management Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sabine Janssens ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).