Ryan Raffety
Western University
Ryan Raffety is a 4th year PhD Candidate at the Richard Ivey School of Business at Western University. His research interest lies in exploring the incentives and motivations behind managers' decisions to pursue or avoid non-essential strategic investments. Ryan's dissertation examines how and why the partitioning of property rights discourages corporate owners from pursuing environmental sustainability.
Prior to returning to academe to pursue a PhD, Ryan worked in the international banking software industry where he last served as a Regional Manager of Client Relations for North & South America and the Caribbean. He has worked in the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, England, Panama, and Mexico.
The environmental consequences of shared ownership
While the sustainability literature has gradually converged around the strategic advantages of improved environmental performance (EP), a wide and persistent variance still remains between those firms embracing a more sustainable path and those avoiding sustainability initiatives all together. We examine whether different property rights regimes systematically influence EP strategies and thus differentiate firms' environmental outcomes. We use Canada's National Pollution Release Inventory and adopt a quasi-experimental design leveraging propensity score matching to examine environmental performance differences between facilities under partitioned (joint ventures) and non-partitioned (independent) property rights regimes. We find that joint venture facilities pollute approximately 72% more hazardous emissions than their independent peers. Further, we discover that the manner in which property rights are partitioned has important implications for environmental outcomes. As ownership dispersion increases from additional partners and/or from more balanced ownership, hazardous emissions increase and the proportion of hazardous waste recycled decreases.