기업의 환경성과와 재무성과의 관계

There has been a decade-long debate on the impact of environmental performance on corporate financial performance. Previous empirical studies that attempt to relate environmental performance to financial performance failed to find a consistent relationship between the two variables due to problems in methodology and/or limited availability of environmental performance data. Proponents of environmentally friendly management contend that efforts to improve environmental performance induce firms to make technological innovations and increase activities that enhance companies’ competitiveness by satisfying consumers. Therefore, good environmental performance increases sales but decreases production costs. As a consequence, companies can have higher productivity and profits as well as protection of environment. On the other hand, opponents of environmentally friendly management argue that firms hardly have incentives to invest in environmentally friendly management because they cannot take full benefit from it. That is to say, firms bear the whole costs of environmental activities but partly profit from it. Firms, therefore, have lower profitability. This paper shows some empirical evidence that firms consistently investing in environmental initiatives are able to gain superior financial outcomes in the future. Unlike the previous studies, this study examines the long-run effects of environmental performance on financial performance and the causal relation between environmental performance and financial performance. Using environmental performance score from the Korea Economic Justice Institute (KEJI) for the period between 1996 and 2000 (evaluation period), we investigate the relationship between the environmental performance of 167 Korean firms and their financial performance. We find that consistent environmentally friendly management has a positive impact on financial performance. We also find the qualitatively same result even after controlling for other variables which have been thought to affect financial performance. This finding supports the view that environmental management does entail economic gains. We report that environmental performance is not affected by prior financial performance. This means that better performing firms do not necessarily engage in environmentally friendly management more actively than poorly performing firms do. We corroborate these results by examining the relation between environmental performance and changes in financial performance before and after the evaluation period of environment performance. Our findings have both academic and practical implications. First, people tend to believe that better performing firms are more likely to participate in environmental management and therefore the positive relationship between the environmental and financial performance can be spurious (Waddock and Graves, 1997; Graves and Waddock, 1999). By showing that environmental performance explains financial performance but not vice versa, this study confirms the causal effect from environmental performance to financial performance. Second, most studies analyze the temporal relation between environmental performance and financial performance (Park and Lee, 2002; Hart and Ahuja, 1996; Cohen, Scott and Jonathan, 1997; Russo and Fouts, 1997; McWilliams and Siegel, 2000). In this study, however, we investigate the relation using the longer sample period under the assumption that environmental management does not have an immediate impact on financial performance, which is more realistic. Above all, our findings suggest that environmental management can be an important strategic tool by which firms can obtain economic advantages. These findings can also alleviate negative awareness about environmental management and act as the catalyst to stimulate proactive environmental management. Some limitations in this study provide opportunities for future research. First, failure to obtain environmental performance data for a longer period made us unable to analyze the effects of environmental performance from various angles. Environmental performance is likely to have different impacts with the lapse of time, which requires further study using data for a longer period. Second, KEJI is a unique source of environmental performance data so far we can obtain, which calls for further development of measurement of firms’ environmental activities. Using various data, we will be able to obtain more reliable and valid evidence of effects of environmental performance on financial performance. Overall, our findings imply that environmental performance does pay to invest in environmental initiatives, but better financial performance does not necessarily result in proactive environmental initiatives.