Ioannis Ioannou

• Associate Professor
• Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School

We investigate the effect of a corporate culture of sustainability on multiple facets of corporate behavior and performance outcomes. Using a matched sample of 180 companies, we find that corporations that voluntarily adopted environmental and social policies by 1993 – termed as High Sustainability companies – exhibit fundamentally different charac...

In this paper, we investigate whether superior performance on corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategies leads to better access to finance. We hypothesize that better access to finance can be attributed to a) reduced agency costs due to enhanced stakeholder engagement and b) reduced informational asymmetry due to increased transparency. Using...

We investigate the institutional drivers of Corporate Social Performance (CSP) by focusing on its three fundamental components: social, environmental and governance performance. Using a large cross-section of firms from 42 countries over 7 years, we are able to explain 41, 46 and 63% of the variation in social performance, environmental performance...

Research Summary Given the growing legitimacy of corporate social responsibility (CSR), many firms engage in symbolic communication to showcase CSR without undertaking commensurate substantive actions. This “CSR decoupling” can create a risk of perceived greenwashing, which, in turn, may negatively affect a firm's performance. In this study, we exp...

In our Decade Award-winning article from 2012, we theorized and provided evidence consistent with nation-level institutions having a significant impact on corporate social performance (CSP) variation across companies. By establishing a link between the macro (i.e., country level) and micro (i.e., firm level) levels of analysis and by synthesizing a...

We develop a conceptual understanding of when and how organizations respond to normative pressures. More precisely, we examine two main factors underlying the willingness and ability of organizations to respond to an issue: issue salience and the cost-benefit analysis of resource mobilization. We suggest that decision makers’ interpretation of issu...

Ioannis Ioannou looks at the curious incident of the dog that didn't bark

: Targets are an integral component of management control systems and play a significant role in achieving desirable performance outcomes. We focus on a key environmental performance objective—reduction of carbon emissions—as a setting in which to examine how target difficulty affects the degree of target completion in long-term non-financial perfo...

Research summary : We explore the effect of the interplay between a firm's external and internal actions on market value in the context of corporate social responsibility ( CSR ). Specifically, drawing from the neo‐institutional theory, we distinguish between external and internal CSR actions and argue that they jointly contribute to the accumulati...

We investigate the effect of corporate sustainability on organizational processes and performance. Using a matched sample of 180 U.S. companies, we find that corporations that voluntarily adopted sustainability policies by 1993—termed as high sustainability companies—exhibit by 2009 distinct organizational processes compared to a matched sample of...

We explore the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings on sell-side analysts’ assessments of firms’ future financial performance. We suggest that when analysts perceive CSR as an agency cost they produce pessimistic recommendations for firms with high CSR ratings. Moreover, we theorize that over time, the emergence of a stakeholder...

Greenwash has become a byword for the worst kind of sustainability strategy – all talk and no action. But have we thrown the baby out with the green bathwater? There may be some commercial value in talking up your sustainability plans, as long as genuine action follows, argues Ioannis Ioannou

During the last two decades, shareholders and non-shareholding stakeholders have simultaneously put pressures on top management to pursue both the financial and the social dimensions of performance. In response, top managers typically engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions—a set of decisions taken within a rather contested context...

This paper examines how existing firm resources and contemporaneous symbolic and substantive strategic actions interact to drive firm performance in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We integrate neo-institutional literature and the resource-based view of the firm to develop hypotheses about the differential impact of these dist...

Spinouts – entrepreneurial ventures founded by ex-employees of incumbent firms within the same industry – have emerged in numerous industries. Some existing literature argues that they typically have a negative association with their parents’ performance due to the loss of human capital, the disruption of organizational routines and subsequent adve...

We argue that a shift in the prevailing institutional logic – from an agency perspective to a value perspective – impacts the evaluation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by sell-side investment analysts. We use a large sample of publicly traded US firms over 15 years and find that under a powerful agency perspective, CSR is unfavorably eval...

Loannis Loannou argues that a commitment to sustainability must be more than skin deep if it is to engender trust in a corporation.

Corporations are increasingly under pressure to improve their environmental performance and to account for potential risks and opportunities associated with climate change. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of monetary and nonmonetary incentives provided by companies to their employees in order to reduce carbon emissions. Specifically, we...

Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim, ‘The consequences of mandatory corporate sustainability reporting’, Working Paper, 30 March 2011.

We examine the effect of mandatory corporate sustainability reporting (MCSR) on several measures of social responsibility using both country and firm-level data. Using data for 58 countries, we show that after the adoption of MCSR laws and regulations, the social responsibility of business leaders increases and both sustainable development and empl...

One of the most asked questions in business today is whether there is a link between a company's social responsibility and its profitability. Ioannis Ioannou's research sheds new light on the subject.

Based on Whitley’s “National Business Systems” (NBS) institutional framework (Whitley 1997; 1999), we theorize about and empirically investigate the impact of nation-level institutions on firms’ corporate social performance (CSP). Using a sample of firms from 42 countries spanning seven years, we construct an annual composite CSP index for each fir...

Retailer capacity decisions can impact sales for a product by affecting, for example, availability and visibility. Using data from the U.S. video rental industry, we report empirical estimates of the effect of capacity on sales. New monitoring technologies facilitated new supply contracts in this industry, which lowered the upfront cost of capacity...

We show that books for general audiences are similarly priced internationally but textbooks are substantially more expensive in the United States. We argue that cost factors cannot explain this phenomenon and discuss several demand-side explanations. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.