时间：7月3日（周五）9:30
地点：浙大管院A723会议室
主题：The effects of asymmetric cost behavior on corporate environmental commitments and actions
主讲人：谢宏，美国肯塔基大学讲席正教授
主持人：董望，浙江大学管理学院教授
主讲人简介：
谢宏，现任美国肯塔基大学盖顿商学院威尔伯·E·切尔格伦会计学讲席正教授. 在加入肯塔基大学之前，谢教授曾先后在亚利桑那大学、伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校和雪城大学任教。谢教授主要研究方向涵盖会计信息与资本市场、盈余管理、审计质量等领域。他已在The Accounting Review 、Contemporary Accounting Research 、Review of Accounting Studies 和Journal of Accounting and Economics 发表文章10余篇(含conditional acceptance). 此外，他还担任 The Accounting Review 等多家国际一流期刊的审稿人，以及 Asia-Pacific Journal of Accounting & Economics 副主编。谢教授研究曾获首届FARS Best Doctoral Dissertation Award、CAPANA Best Paper Award、JAAF Symposium on ESG Best Paper Award等。谢教授1983年毕业于上海交通大学，获工学学士学位; 1986年获得加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚大学工商管理硕士（MBA）学位; 1998年毕业于美国爱荷华大学，获会计学博士学位。
摘要：
We examine the effects of asymmetric cost behavior (“cost stickiness”)—costs decreasin less when sales decline than increasing when sales rise—on firms’ environmental commitments and actions. Prior research suggests that environmental commitments often entail multi-year resource deployments that are difficult to scale back and that investors are averse to reductions in such commitments. Building on these insights, we predict that firms with stickier costs will preemptively make lower current environmental commitments than those with less-sticky costs. The intuitionis that firms with stickier costs will have disproportionately large earnings declines when sales fall, constraining their ability to maintain high levels of environmental commitments in the future. Using ClimateBERT to analyze Management Discussion and Analysis disclosures and earnings call transcripts, we construct firm-year measures of environmental commitments and find evidence consistent with our prediction. We further show that firms with stickier costs undertake weaker real environmental actions, reflected in higher industry pollution, more frequent environmental violations, and less green innovation. To improve identification, we use two quasi-experimental designs exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in cost stickiness arising from wrongful discharge law recognitions and close-call union elections. Cross-sectional analyses provide further support for the mechanisms. Overall, our study identifies cost behavior as an important determinant of firms’ environmental commitments and actions.
