How do shareholders influence international firms' environmental strategies? The differential impact of strategic and financial investors Bueno García, Manuel Delgado Márquez, Blanca Luisa Georgallis, Panikos Aragón Correa, Juan Alberto Environmental proactivity Environmental strategy Ownership Shareholders Internationalization Institutional theory Natural resource based-view Multinational enterprises MNEs Green capabilities Governance The authors thank the partial funding for this research from research grants BES-2017-081174, ECO2016-75909-P, and PID2019- 106725GB-I00 (Spanish State Research Agency – Innovation and Science Ministry, 10.13039/501100011033), B-SEJ-398-UGR20 and B-SEJ-291-UGR18 (FEDER-European Commission, Regional Government of Andalusia), and UCE2018.02_2021–02 (Excellence Unit “Advanced Research in Economics and Business”, University of Granada, Spain). Debates about the drivers of corporate environmental strategy as well as the influence of shareholders on environmental investments have grown exponentially in the last decade. This paper provides a novel perspective on the influence of investors on a firm’s environmental strategy by theorizing how the shareholders’ orientation may provide different resources for firms to outperform environmental institutional pressures, and further analyzing how foreign market exposure moderates this relationship. Our results, produced from a longitudinal sample of 2237 observations between 2007 and 2017 from 276 US firms in 11 industries, show that having a higher percentage of strategic shareholders positively drives firms’ environmental proactivity. Meanwhile, having a higher percentage of financial shareholders is positively related to firms’ environmental proactivity only at high levels of foreign market exposure, but is negatively related at low levels. Our results contribute to the ownership and environmental strategy literature by delimitating the different influences of strategic and financial investors on firms’ environmental strategy and making a bridge between institutional and resource-based perspectives. 2024-03-06T12:59:26Z 2024-03-06T12:59:26Z 2022 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Published version: Bueno-García, M., Delgado-Márquez, B., Georgallis, P., & Aragón-Correa, J. A. (2022). How do shareholders influence international firms' environmental strategies? The differential impact of strategic and financial investors. Long Range Planning, 102183. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2022.102183 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/89835 10.1016/j.lrp.2022.102183 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Elsevier