Proactive Environmental Strategies in Transportation Firms: The Role of Ownership Structure

The present study examines the explanatory power of corporate governance issues, such as a firm’s ownership structure, as potential determinants of companies’ environmental proactivity. In particular, the paper aims at understanding such relationship in firms that operate in transportation activities, which may heavily impact on the environment. The theoretical analysis is completed by an empirical exploration on a sample of European and US firms, belonging to the transportation sector (air, road, rail, maritime and multimodal), that were included in the Carbon Disclosure Project questionnaire 2014. The results show that corporate ownership matters in firms’ environmental proactivity. In particular, firms with a higher percentage of institutional investors’ ownership present poorer environmental proactivity, while a greater percentage of family ownership or state ownership does not seem to be related with firms’ proactive environmental strategies.