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Socially responsible investing and multinationals' environmental harm: Evidence from global remote sensing data
Orientador(es)
Resumo(s)
This paper examines how Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) capital affects the
environmental footprint of multinational enterprises. We exploit the inverse relationship
between local pollution and high-frequency-and-precision satellite-based
measurements of vegetation health, captured through the normalized difference
vegetation index (NDVI). Combining NDVI with SRI ownership data for 52,806
facilities belonging to 911 multinationals in 124 countries between 2006 and 2020
allows us to leverage both cross-sectional and within-facility variation in SRI exposure
over time. We find that, on average, greater SRI ownership is associated
with improved vegetation health in surrounding areas, consistent with reductions
in firm-induced environmental damage. Using mergers as a plausibly exogenous
source of variation in SRI ownership corroborates these findings. However, exploiting
the global structure of multinational production networks, we find a striking
asymmetry: improvements near facilities located in OECD countries coincide with
deterioration near the same firms’ facilities in non-OECD countries, consistent with
pollution offshoring. Finally, we show that this asymmetry intensifies with more
active investor oversight, suggesting that investor engagement alone is insufficient
to mitigate environmental harm in the absence of strong domestic regulation or
global coordinated monitoring.
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) Plant-Level Pollution Institutional Investors
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Gianinazzi, Virginia and Girard, Victoire and Lehlali, Mehdi and Prado, Melissa Porras, Socially responsible investing and multinationals' environmental harm: Evidence from global remote sensing data (December 09, 2025). Nova SBE Working Paper Series No. 676