With climate change becoming more severe, policy makers must impose environmental regulations that will lead firms to adopt sustainable corporate models. According to the Porter hypothesis, environmental regulation can favour the implementation of business strategies that improve economic and environmental performances. In this study, we examine how one such form of regulation, the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), impacts firm performance, and we subsequently widen the examination beyond the regulation to evaluate an economic crisis which could potentially confound regulation effects. We estimate a panel model with time- and firm-fixed effects for different subsamples that disentangle the effect of the EU ETS policy from the 2008 economic crisis. The results indicate that the EU ETS policy in its third phase can activate the Porter hypothesis and is effective in fuelling the implementation of sustainable corporate models by firms. However, we also find that the economic crisis neutralises the effects of the regulation on firm performance, precluding the triggering of the Porter hypothesis in severely affected firms.

中文翻译：

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将经济危机影响与环境监管影响分开：对可持续发展的影响

随着气候变化变得更加严重，政策制定者必须实施环境法规，引导企业采用可持续的企业模式。根据波特假设，环境监管可以有利于改善经济和环境绩效的商业战略的实施。在本研究中，我们研究了这样一种监管形式，即欧盟排放交易计划 (EU ETS)，如何影响公司绩效，随后我们将审查范围扩大到监管之外，以评估可能会混淆监管效果的经济危机。我们估计了一个面板模型，该模型具有不同子样本的时间和公司固定效应，这些子样本将 EU ETS 政策的影响与 2008 年经济危机分开。结果表明，欧盟排放交易体系第三阶段的政策可以激活波特假设，并有效推动企业实施可持续企业模式。然而，我们还发现，经济危机抵消了监管对企业绩效的影响，阻止了在受到严重影响的企业中触发波特假设。