The product-market performance benefits of environmental policy: Why customer awareness and firm innovativeness matter

Researchers have widely studied the nexus between corporate environmental (‘green’) policy and its green performance and firm financial performance, but with mixed findings. A potential explanation for these mixed findings is the focus of extant studies on the direct and immediate impact of environmental performance on financial performance to the exclusion of firm-specific boundary conditions. Furthermore, all prior research study the effect of environmental performance on either stock market-based performance measures (i.e. stock return) or accounting-based performance measures (i.e. ROA). A missing third dimension of firm performance, product–market-based performance (i.e. market share) has so far remained unexplored despite representing a crucial objective when innovating. Using Newsweek’s annual green ranking as a novel measure of environmental performance for a panel of U.S. firms from 2010 to 2015, this paper attempts to fill these voids in the literature. The results show a positive relationship between firms’ environmental performance and market share as a measure of product–market-based performance. The findings further demonstrate that this relationship is positively moderated by the level of customer awareness and innovativeness of the firm: the higher the level of awareness of a firm’s environmental credentials and innovativeness, the stronger the effects of environmental performance on market share. Our results are robust against endogeneity concerns and alternative measures of firm financial and environmental performance.