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Research Impact
 Paper Series

King's Business School Research Impact Papers publicise the wide-ranging impact of research conducted at King’s Business School. Research Impact is a core pillar of our shared mission at King's Business School and is fundamental to our efforts to improve societies around the world in the face of economic, environmental, social and political challenges. In practice, it means our research is contributing to improved business decision-making, more effective policy-making, more cohesive coalition-building and better informed job design and consumer choices.

The research guiding the impact is high calibre and increasingly  tends to straddle multiple disciplines – generating new ideas from economics, sociology, psychology and environmental management, among others. The impact is sometimes local, reflecting our presence in London and our strong relationships with local councils, NGOs and London businesses.

It also influences the work of international organisations, reflecting our commitment to contribute to progress towards the UN 2030 agenda for sustainable development. We hope this series of papers inspires further research impact and we welcome new relationships with individuals, organisations and policy-makers who are keen to engage with our research.

Emissions gaming? A gap in the GHG Protocol may be facilitating gaming in accounting of GHG emissions

The framework for calculating firms’ greenhouse gas emissions via the GHG Protocol is highly complex. It involves the collection and management of large datasets on companies’ activities, and both scientific and estimation uncertainty in translating such activities into emissions estimates. Moreover, there are substantial degrees of freedom created by the existence of multiple calculation methods and emission factor databases, which deliver markedly different emissions estimates for the same underlying activity data inputs

This framework, we argue, is ripe for being gamed and is unlikely to produce accurate estimates of companies’ true emissions in a durable way. We show, via a pilot study using proprietary data, that these differences are material. Emissions could be 5% higher than reported, an outcome that could increase firms’ cost of equity by 46 basis points, reducing market capitalisation by 1.9%. We offer five policy recommendations aimed at making the calculation and reporting of GHG emissions robust.

EMissionsGaming-1

Improving pay and productivity with sector collective bargaining

Across the world, many workers have experienced prolonged wage stagnation and insecure working conditions. At the same time, employers face challenges with staff shortages and low productivity. Sectoral and multi employer bargaining that covers broad segments of the workforce can help to solve these challenges and can bring positive outcomes to workers, firms and wider society.

This King’s Business School Research Impact Paper examines different types of institutions to support high collective bargaining coverage. It reviews systems with high union density and employer density, different types of state intervention that extend the agreements to all workers within a sector and instruments that allow unions to establish multi employer agreements to safeguard against outsourcing.

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