CORPORATE DECARBONIZATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION

Climate change is a critical and urgent global challenge whose solution requires corporate actors to take aggressive action to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. This dissertation contributes three studies to the scholarship on corporate decarbonization and climate change mitigation. In “Do Firms Reduce Emissions Efficiently” (Chapter 2), I provide evidence that less than 20% of a global sample of firms pursue emissions reduction efficiently, notwithstanding the prevalence of efficiency as a central assumption in carbon management policies worldwide. I abductively test alternative explanations and objective functions that might describe firm-level emissions reduction actions, and find that single-goal optimization is in general not strongly consilient with firms’ actual emission reduction behavior. In “Values in Action” (Chapter 3), I build a theoretical framework differentiating explicit value signals from implicit values-in-action as the mechanism through which firms make trade-offs that translate their multiple goals into action. I empirically identify firms based on the tradeoffs they accept between financial and emissions reduction outcomes, and find heterogeneous strategies for balancing these multiple goals. I find that stringent target setting and high-level managerial control—but not carbon pricing—are associated with climate mitigation actions that are both more expensive and more impactful. Finally, in “What Gets Measured Gets Managed?” I study the role of emissions metrics in influencing both within-firm resource allocation decisions and external cross-firm evaluations of firm performance. While there is a lack of commensuration between managerial reporting behavior and public policy which complicates comparisons, preliminary evidence suggests that it is the alignment between the values embedded commensuration and the norms in each domain, rather than the (in)commensurate numbers themselves, that seems to drive behavioral responses. Together, these studies push scholars, policy makers, and practitioners to attend to the multiplicity and complexity of organizational goals and values, particularly in relation to urgently needed actions to avert catastrophic climate change.