earticle

영어

The study aims to provide an empirical evidence as to whether environmental conservation costs are sticky. Regression analyses of cost stickiness are employed to compare and evaluate how differently sales change rates explain the cost change rates are affected by the quality of corporate governance, energy-intensive industry and between the pre and post crisis periods. The results of this paper are as follows. First, companies increase their input levels in various environmental cost items and exhibit more stickiness in costs. Second, we find that corporate governance is not effective to mitigate the degree of cost stickiness. Third, the firms which belong to the energy-intensive company group show less sticky or anti-sticky. Finally, we found that environmental conservation costs decreased at higher rate compared to the sales change rate when sales decreases during the period after the global financial crisis(2009-2011) than pre-crisis period(2005-2007). It implies that managers decrease environmental conservation costs when sales decrease, irrespective of business cycle and management characteristics.