Beyond Adoption: Scaling Intensity of Sustainability Strategies and Revenue Trajectories in Large Firms During COVID-19

This paper examines whether the intensity of sustainability implementation, rather than its mereadoption, is associated with firms’ perceived revenue trajectories around the COVID-19 crisis.Using survey data from C-suite executives at large firms across 19 industries and 13 countries, sus-tainability scaling is decomposed into deciles and linked to revenue growth and its period-to-periodvariation across four phases: pre-crisis, in-crisis, and two post-crisis horizons. The relationship ismarkedly asymmetric: only the top deciles of implementation intensity, particularly the highesttwo, are associated with more favorable revenue trajectories, while lower and intermediate decilesshow no robust association. This pattern holds under OLS and ordered logit specifications, andunder an extensive set of firm-level controls. The findings indicate that revenue growth duringsystemic shocks may be tied to how far sustainability strategies are scaled, not merely whetherthey are adopted