Carl Joachim Kock

When the Market Misleads: Stock Prices, Firm Behavior, and Industry Evolution

This paper augments learning and institutional theories of firm behavior with an explicit focus on the idiosyncratic characteristics of learning from financial markets. Various streams of literature implicitly assume that financial markets influence firm strategies, yet the specifics of these interactions are not well specified. Motivated by a case study of the retail brokerage industry, this study proposes three particular characteristics of learning from financial markets. First, there is vicarious learning from outcomes (e.g., stock valuations), yet this has characteristics that are more similar to institutional forms of mimetic isomorphism. Second, the forward-looking and complex nature of financial valuations incites a paradoxically simplified type of crude heuristic learning. Third, there is a mutual and simultaneous learning process in that firms learn from financial markets, which in turn are themselves in a process of social construction. This combination of special characteristics suggests a number of learning pathologies that center around an increasing likelihood (compared with other types of learning and adaptation) of falling prey to misleading signals. A computer simulation, based on a model in which Cournot duopolists play a multistage game involving investment and cost reduction, explores the implications of these characteristics and pathologies in a systematic way.

Are shareholders environmental "laggards"? Corporate Governance and environmental firm performance

From a reactive, antagonistic stance towards environmental regulations, many firms have evolved to act in a pro-active fashion to integrate environmental issues into their core strategies. Using measures of different corporate governance instruments that proxy for the ability of managers or shareholders to implement their strategic preferences we demonstrate empirically that shareholders are indeed laggards because they lower firm environmental performance while the latter actually has positive effects on firm financial performance. Managers, however, push for better environmental and hence financial performance and thus act against shareholders preferences, but in their interest.

Investor's Perception of Value Creation in Environmental Strategies: The Impact of Past Environmental Performance on Future Stock Market Returns

In this paper we test whether investors incorporate into stock market prices the future increase or decrease in firm value due to corporate strategies that cause better or worse firm environmental performance. We report strong evidence that low-polluter companies have substantial abnormal positive returns in the subsequent years after the environmental information was publicized while in the same period of time, high-polluter companies have no abnormal returns (positive or negative). On the contrary, we find exactly the opposite results when we analyze stock market behavior the exact same day the environmental information was publicly released. This is, for this exact publication date high polluter companies have significant negative abnormal returns while low-polluter companies have abnormal returns that are not statistically different than zero. Overall, our results are consistent with a world in which investors have been slow to properly evaluate future increases in firm value associated with current good firm environmental performance while on the other hand investors have correctly discounted the future negative financial effects corresponding to high-polluter companies.