환경투자활동에 있어서 사외이사의 역할

There has been much discussion in recent decades about the extent of firm's environmental management, increasingly stringent environmental regulation and stakeholder pressures have placed the natural environment on the strategic agenda of virtually all firms. Every major operational or strategic decision, including a firm's environmental investment, must go through the board(Kassinis and Vafeas, 2002; Lee, 2007). From this point of view, the main purpose of this paper is to find the relationship between the over-election of outside directors and environmental equipment investment. In South Korea, the outside directors were not by the voluntary corporate participation but by the law to improve the corporate governance system. Therefore, firms are not active in appointing outside directors in their board and seem to satisfy only the minimum criteria stipulated by the law. Specifically, firms with the over-election of outside directors(the excess outside directors) can effectively control manager(Jung and Kim, 2008). Therefore, the main hypothesis of this study is whether firms with the excess outside directors have a positive effect on environmental equipment investment. The result of this study indicates that firms with the over-election of outside directors have a positive effect on environmental equipment investment. Also, the firms electing the outside directors with environmental careers have more positive effect on environmental equipment investment. According to the overall results of this study, we arrive at the conclusion that improved governance systems effect on the strategic decision of environmental equipment investment. These findings could be helpful to the decision on the environmental policy and governance of companies.