Summary: In the last decade, a rising number of firms have adopted voluntary international environmental management and product standards, such as the international ISO 14001 management standard or organic certification. Although emerging research analyzes the impact of these standards on environmental and financial performance, there is to our knowledge no empirical research on how they affect the productivity of employees. In this paper, we investigate the direct relationship between environmental standards and labor productivity, as well as two mediating mechanisms through which environmental standards influence labor productivity: employee training and enhanced interpersonal contacts within the firm. Our empirical results, based on a French employer–employee survey from 5220 firms, reveal that firms that have adopted environmental standards enjoy a one standard deviation higher labor productivity than firms that have not adopted such standards. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Fait aussi partie de la "Série Scientifique - Scientific Series" des CIRANO Working Papers, n°2014s-34. Le fichier joint correspond à cette version.International audienceThis paper analyzes how different combinations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) dimensions affect corporate economic performance. We use various dimensions of CSR to examine whether firms rely on different combinations of CSR, in terms of quality versus quantity of CSR practices. Our empirical analysis based on an original database including 10,293 French firms shows that different CSR dimensions in isolation impact positively firms’ profits but their effect in term on intensity varies among CSR dimensions. Moreover, the findings on the qualitative CSR measure, based on interaction between its dimensions, show that the substitutability of these dimensions is highly significant for firm performance. However, in terms of the intensity, those interactions produce differential effects. Actually, asking whether a firm starting with a certain configuration cannot perform better by adding or removing some dimension(s) we found that only one configuration fulfills this requirement: green and HR. The interpretation is that when a firm starts with this configuration then it is better not to move to another configuration. In all other configurations, firms can always improve their profits either by adding or removing some dimensions. Finally, the profitability of CSR investments in French firms seems to rely on a specific qualitative mix of different CSR dimensions rather than a pure quantitative approach accumulating practices without designing a consistent set of interactions among them