Firms have increasingly taken on the commitment to sustainability due to environmental and social concerns. Environmental and social sustainability can create firm value and social welfare through cost reduction and revenue growth. While indicating a desire to do more, firms face challenges while engaging with stakeholders in their supply chains – suppliers and consumers. Suppliers are key partners to achieve cost reduction while customers can be the driver for revenue growth. If firms do not overcome the challenges properly, such a win-win situation of both firms and their supply chain stakeholders may not exist. This dissertation aims to understand and suggest ways to overcome the challenges which firms and their supply chain stakeholders face while collaboratively pursuing sustainability.

In the first essay, I investigate the financial impact of a buyer-initiated supplier-focused sustainability improvement program on suppliers’ profitability. The results indicate that a supplier sustainability program may lead to short-term financial loss but long-term financial gain for suppliers, and this effect is contingent on supplier slack resources. The second essay of this dissertation focuses on the consumers and investigates their reactions to two types of firm environmental sustainability claims – sustainable production versus sustainable consumption. The results indicate that firm sustainable consumption claims increase consumers’ purchase, thus leads to larger firm sales, whereas firm sustainable production claims decrease consumers’ buying intention, then result in smaller firm sales. Therefore, I show that, contrary to extant belief, firm environmental sustainability can decrease consumers’ intention to buy. Finally, a firm may be impacted when some of its upstream or downstream stakeholders, or its own operations, are impacted by a natural disaster, which are becoming more frequent due to climate change. In the third essay I study the joint effect of market attention and donation timing on firm stock returns based on the experiences of firms who donated to the 2017 Hurricane Harvey. I conclude that neither the first donors nor the followers can mitigate the negative stock returns due to disasters. However, firms who match their donation timing with market attention experience less negative stock market returns compared to other counterparts.

Monetary contributions are a main interest for non-governmental organizations. This study focuses on identifying variables that might impact total contributions. The variables chosen for this study are diversity, coverage, efficiency, size and fundraising. These five variables are predicted to positively affect the total contributions of both government and public donors. To answer this question, financial and firm specific data from 49 non-governmental organizations were collected from 990 forms from the IRS. The dataset allowed for a time frame of ten years to evaluate what specifically influences monetary contributions. The specific control variables are net assets, number of offices in regions, and fundraising. These were tested against number of programs and the spend ratio. These are believed to positively affect contributions, and the results will lead to an operational strategy for non-governmental organizations. These hypotheses were tested with a cross sectional linear regression. As it was discovered, governments and public donors value different variables. Governments donate more to organizations with larger diversity and coverage. The public focuses on the amount of fundraising, size of the organization and efficiency.