Corporate Environmental Crime: What to do About One-Time Offenders?

• In Event: Trajectories and Patterns of White-Collar and Corporate Offending

Abstract

Studies of corporate environmental crime have noted some of the factors associated with repeat offending. What is less well understood is the connection between an initial transgression and the factors that increase the likelihood that further offending will occur. This is an important consideration for thinking about corporate recidivism. This paper seeks to explore this through a consideration of companies who were pursued by the Environment Agency for England and Wales over a 12-year period. The analysis compares one-time offenders (n = 1821) with repeat offenders (n = 446) and a non-offending sample (n = 4460). The results suggest that companies that offended once differed from non-offending companies on several measures of financial performance, including assets and net income, return on common equity and measures of bankruptcy risk. Meanwhile, the one-time offenders differed from the repeat offenders on several company descriptors, including company size and industry sector. The results have implications for those trying to identify when best to intervene to prevent repeat offending by companies, and specifically how to respond to initial transgressions. These implications and recommendations for policy are discussed, as are directions for future research.

Author

• Ben Hunter, University of Greenwich