National institutional antecedents to corporate environmental performance

Understanding what drives firms towards environmentally sound manufacturing practices is important. While we have learned in recent years about firm-level drivers of corporate environmental performance (CEP), we know little about country-level antecedents. Our objective is to investigate the extent to which firm-level variation in CEP is explained by country-level differences. We develop hypotheses building on the Varieties of Capitalism framework and find—using data on 2724 firms in 42 different countries—that CEP is driven by the degree of market freedom of a firm's home country, the non-governmental organizations active in the country and its freedom of the press.