Preliminary Conference Programme

This study examines firms’ strategic use of deceptive environmental disclosures to obscure their true environmental risks and secure capital market benefits. Utilizing a novel measure that captures deceptive linguistic cues, we find that firms with higher pollution levels tend to engage in more environmental deception. This tendency is especially pronounced among firms with stronger profitability and higher growth prospects, consistent with our theoretical framework. Empirical analysis shows that such deceptive disclosure strategies are associated with short-term increases in market returns, green fund inflows, and improved ESG ratings. However, these advantages tend to fade as investors acquire more accurate information over time.

Retail shipping is responsible for nearly 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions and costs retailers billions annually. Firms have long treated shipping optimization as a supply chain problem, investing in warehouses, routes, and infrastructure. We show that a largely overlooked lever—product ranking algorithms at the consumer search stage—can deliver substantial efficiency and sustainability gains without capital investment. We redesign ranking as a cost–conversion optimization, embedding shipping costs directly into the ranking algorithm. Because such re-ranking significantly reshapes which products are shown, it challenges both offline evaluation and online learning. In a field experiment with four million consumers on a major e-commerce platform, this demand-side intervention reduced shipping costs by 2–3%, cut delivery distances by 34 miles per order, and lowered emissions by 3.8%, while preserving conversions and customer satisfaction. The emissions savings were equivalent to the annual electricity use of 50,000 U.S. households or the emissions of 58,000 gasoline cars. When the policy underperformed, it exposed structural rigidities such as brand-driven demand or inflexible warehouse networks. These results show that ranking algorithms can both shape demand and diagnose supply chain strategy, helping platforms align profitability with sustainability at scale

Information transparency is central to well-functioning green markets, yet stricter standards may discourage firms from engaging in environmentally oriented activities. We study the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, which tightened substantiation requirements for environmental marketing claims and improved communication between firms and consumers. This regulatory change plausibly increased transparency in green product markets, allowing us to identify its causal effects on firms’ green business disclosure, green innovation, and real outcomes. We develop a novel firm-level measure of green business engagement by applying large language models and supervised classifiers to 10-K Item 1 (Business) disclosures to identify substantiated green products and services. Following the Green Guides, firms with weak environmental fundamentals reduce green business disclosure, consistent with more cautious claims and greenhushing. In contrast, firms previously outside the coverage of third-party environmental rating agencies, as well as close product-market rivals, increase green disclosure, suggesting that improved transparency lowers signaling costs and facilitates credible repositioning into green markets. Importantly, enhanced transparency is associated with increased genuine green innovation. Finally, firms with greater exposure to green business benefit from improved market information, exhibiting higher markups and profitability.