Preliminary Conference Programme

Climate litigation against corporations is on the rise, yet research on firms’ responses yields mixed findings. We argue that different types of litigation remedial requests trigger distinctive institutional logics as interpretive cultural toolkit and thus explain this inconsistency. When firms see their jurisdictional peers facing injunctive relief litigation, they activate a climate logic to interpret the legal action, perceive sustained pressures, and thus reduce their emissions. In contrast, when they see their peers facing monetary relief litigation, firms activate a financial logic: they perceive the legal action as financially motivated and see an opportunity to “buy out” the pressure, ultimately increasing their emissions. When peers face mixed relief litigation, firms experience institutional ambiguity and struggle to activate an interpretive system that combines competing logics, resulting in inaction. Using a 2010–2023 dataset linking U.S. climate litigation to facility emissions, a contiguous border discontinuity design, and complementary interviews with legal experts, we provide causal evidence for these arguments. We address concerns on whether there are genuine emissions responses (e.g., pollution outsourcing or reduction), whether it is driven by logic activation or cancelling out of multiple logics, and whether legal threat intensity or corporate-level factors drives both litigation types and emissions responses.

This paper resolves a puzzle in research intersecting nonmarket strategy and social movements: that social investments to local communities can avoid community conflict by alleviating grievances while they can also cause conflict by stimulating opportunistic behavior to exploit firms. Based on nine months of fieldwork in Peru’s mining industry, this paper examines how one of the world’s largest mining firms sought to manage violent community conflict through social investments. The analysis shows how social investments commodified grievances and turned the community’s use of violent conflict into a calculated transaction, in exchange for social investments. Over time, violent conflict became normalized as an “everyday” activity, rendering the use of social investments to quell conflict ineffective. The findings matter for theory and practice: social investments can fundamentally transform firm-community relations, beyond reducing grievances or stimulating opportunism, in ways that can institutionalize violent community conflict.

We document that corporate directors’ past exposure to abnormally severe climatic natural disasters shape their prosocial preferences and governance outcomes. Using detailed data on director career histories and county-level natural disasters, we identify Directors with Abnormal Disaster Experiences (DADEs). DADEs are significantly more likely to be affiliated with nonprofit organizations, consistent with heightened prosocial preferences. Firms with more DADEs on their boards are more likely to implement climate-related policies, including board oversight of climate policies, emission targets, and managerial decarbonization incentives, and have lower Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions. These effects are not explained by CEO influence, and are stronger when disaster experiences are more salient (i.e., larger and accumulated over longer histories), with DADEs serving on governance, audit, or ESG committees, and with DADEs in large or high-emission firms. Despite the role of prosocial preferences, firms with more DADEs do not exhibit worse financial or operational performance, lower investment or higher firm risk. We provide causal evidence using director deaths as plausibly exogenous shocks and placebo tests of directors who narrowly missed disasters. Our findings show that directors’ salient experiences heighten their prosocial preferences that lead them to influence corporate policy.