Séminaire de recherche avec Alexander Dyck (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto)

Lieu : Campus Sophia Antipolis
Heure : 10h30-12h00
Intervenant : Alexander Dyck (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto) 

Résumé : Closely controlled firms constitute a significant percentage of the world’s publicly traded firms
and are largely immune from outside investors’ pressure. Do controlling owners choose a higher 
level of environmental performance than the widely held publicly traded firm, as Hart and Zingales 
(2017) suggest they are capable of doing? We test this in a sample of 3,833 firms from 35 countries
using actual carbon emissions as the sustainability metric. We segment into three categories of 
controlled firms: family, government and other. We introduce two new aspects regarding
emissions performance. To analyze whether an owner’s environmental preferences to be clean 
matter, we use generative AI to construct a measure of clean preferences for each family in our 
sample. We also take the marginal cost of pursuing clean into account by using cross-country 
differences in regulations and expectations regarding carbon emissions.
We find that no category of controlled firm delivers lower carbon emissions, on average, than the 
widely held firm. We find that family owner environmental preferences matter. Families that have 
low environmental preferences have significantly higher carbon emissions than widely held firms. 
Only when family firms have high environmental preferences, and the marginal cost to improve 
carbon emissions is low, does family control deliver lower carbon emissions. Our main takeaway 
is that controlled firms, which could choose clean, are in almost all settings not cleaner. This
suggests strict limits as to what is feasible for publicly traded firms absent systematic regulations 
that apply to all firms.