Green or blue? The effect of sustainability committees on ESG decoupling

Abstract

This research examines the effect of having a sustainability committee on firms’ ESG decoupling. As corporate sustainability becomes more and more important for firms’ operation, stakeholders also pay attention to whether firms’ claims on sustainable development are in accordance with their actual business practice. As a board level governance mechanism, whether the sustainability committee has impacts on the external and internal ESG actions is interesting and necessary to explore. Previous studies on sustainability committee are mainly based on small samples of large firms over a short sample period. Based on a large sample of 2,759 US listed firms covering different industrial sectors over the 2002 to 2021 period, I find that sustainability committees increase the overall ESG decoupling. Following analyses on the decomposed decoupling measures reveal that such committees reduce the environmental decoupling but increase the social and governance decoupling, indicating the potential bluewashing side effects. I adopt the alternative decoupling measures, propensity score matching process, and the Heckman two-stage method to ensure the robustness of the main findings. Three cross-sectional tests are performed. The positive relationship between ESG decoupling and sustainability committees is stronger for firms with a higher level of analyst coverage and weaker for firms having a higher level of institutional ownership. Additionally, the positive association between social decoupling and sustainability committees is more pronounced for firms with higher media coverage related to ESG issues.