Does corporate environmental performance change through environmental policies between pre and post 2011? Evidence from firm-level data in Germany and Japan

After the nuclear disaster, in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the Japanese government shut down all nuclear power plants in Japan. The German government decided to permanently phase out nuclear power. Japan was, and still is, directly affected by the nuclear disaster and Germany is considered the most sensitive country to nuclear energy after the nuclear disaster. This study aims to empirically examine whether there were changes in corporate environmental performance through companies’ implementations of environmental policies from before 2011 to after 2011 in Germany and Japan in the non-financial and non-energy. The dependent variable (as corporate environmental performance) is defined as a firm’s sales divided by corporate direct greenhouse gas emissions (Scope 1) in the logarithm form. The independent variables are nine corporate policies, which all are dummy variables. This study uses the global firm dataset from the Bloomberg professional service where the number of observation is 832 in over a seven-year period (2006-2012). In the regression result, we find that when roughly examining pre and post 2011, using a dummy variable, there is significant change regarding the Japan and both sample. We then find that in eight out of the nine cases there is no effect of implementing the environmental policies on corporate efficiency.