Supply chain sustainability is a topic of immense importance for the press, political activists, managers, analysts, investors, shareholders, and stakeholders (e.g., local communities). One aspect of a firm's sustainability concerns the actions taken by members of its supply chain, such as the use of child labor and the dumping of toxic emissions. While there have been several attempts in measuring firms' sustainability as it pertains to their supply chains, these approaches suffer from numerous methodological weaknesses. This has limited our ability to answer important questions such as how firms' sustainability performance as it pertains to their supply chain evolved over time, and what factors affect this evolution? This question constitutes my primary research interest and has motivated my three-essay dissertation that:Essay one: develops a new approach for measuring firm-level corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) supply chain practices using log-logistic item response theory models;Essay two: studies how firm-level CSR and CSI supply chain practices have evolved over time using piecewise latent growth curve models; andEssay three: examines the dynamic inter-relationships between firm-level CSR and CSI supply chain practices using dynamic panel models.To answer these questions, I use panel data from 2003 - 2018 for hundreds of publicly-traded manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers from KLD, which I merge with financial data from COMPUSTAT, market concentration from US Census Bureau Economic Indicators, and Upstreamness measuring of the average distance from final use from American Economic Review. My results improve our theoretical understanding of how sustainable supply chain practices can be measured and how they evolve over time.
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