The Impact of Corporate Sustainability on Organizational Processes and Performance

This paper was previously circulated as "The Impact of a Corporate Culture of Sustainability on Corporate Behavior and Performance." Robert G. Eccles is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. Ioannis Ioannou is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. George Serafeim is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Robert Eccles and George Serafeim gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Division of Faculty Research and Development of the Harvard Business School. We would like to thank Christopher Greenwald for supplying us with the ASSET4 data. Moreover, we would like to thank Cecile Churet, Michael Baldinger and Iordanis Chatziprodromou from Sustainable Asset Management for giving us access to their proprietary data. We are grateful to Chris Allen, Jeff Cronin, Christine Rivera, and James Zeitler for research assistance. We thank Ben Esty, David Larcker, Joshua Margolis, Costas Markides, Jeremy Stein, Catherine Thomas, and seminar participants at Boston College, Columbia University, ESMT, the INSEAD - Social Innovation Center, the NBER conference on the "Causes and Consequences of Corporate Culture", Cardiff University, Saint Andrews University, International Finance Corporation, and the Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School for helpful comments. Finally, we would like to thank the Department Editor, Prof. B. Cassiman, an anonymous Associate Editor and three anonymous reviewers for insightful guidance through the review process and excellent insights. We are solely responsible for any remaining errors in this manuscript. We are solely responsible for any errors in this manuscript. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• March 27, 2012