Disentangling the Bidirectional Relationships Across the Corporate Sustainable Development Indicators

[EN] This study disentangles the relationships that exist between the four indicators of corporate sustainable development: economic, environmental, social, and governance. We account for the potential bidirectionality of the relationships, control for the dynamic nature of the sustainability process, and address the endogeneity problem to appropriately analyze the sustainability process. We estimated a panel data from 734 U.S. companies from 2004 through 2016 by using the system generalized method of moments and fnd evidence of a clear dynamic nature of the businesses’ sustainability process. The results show that the current levels of the four sustainable development indicators are strongly determined by the levels of these indicators in the two previous years. Our results also show that corpo rate sustainable development follows a virtuous circle. The relationships across the eco nomic, environmental, and social indicators are bidirectional and positive. Hence, these three sustainability indicators do not compete for available resources. On the contrary, they are tightly interconnected in a frm’s sustainable development processes. Therefore, practitioners and regulators should consider these indicators simultaneously to promote sustainability in businesses and apply long-term sustainability policies. Altogether, our evidence supports the idea that frms can do good by doing well, and they do well by doing good.
Publicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCLE.