Seminar with Qian Liu: Supply Chain Relationships and Biodiversity Conservation Efforts

Open seminar titled 'Supply Chain Relationships and Biodiversity Conservation Efforts: The Impact of Firms’ Identity as Major Customers' with Postdoc Qian Liu, Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen.

Qian Liu from IFRO will host a seminar to present preliminary results from her recent work on “Supply Chain Relationships and Biodiversity Conservation Efforts: The Impact of Firms’ Identity as Major Customers”. 

Qian hopes to discuss her results with participants and get feedback before the manuscript is submitted to a journal.

How to participate?

No registration needed, simply show up.

The seminar is open to all.

Read the abstract:

This study investigates how existing supply chain relationships influence firms’ biodiversity conservation efforts. Specifically, we focus on the role of a firm’s identity as a major client for its suppliers.

We hypothesize that when a firm acts as a major customer, it may experience pressure from supply chain to prioritize operational activities. This pressure can diminish the firm’s incentives to invest in biodiversity conservation, since such efforts often yield limited short-term benefits.

Our analysis is based on firm-year level observations of U.S. firms from 2012 to 2019. Initial findings reveal that firms identified as major customers of their suppliers—defined as accounting for more than 10% of their suppliers’ sales—are less likely to engage in biodiversity conservation initiatives.

This conclusion remains robust across various sensitivity tests, including alternative sample periods, independent variables, additional controls, propensity score matching, and the entropy balancing approach.

Overall, this study suggests that the structure of supply chain dynamics significantly impacts firms’ likelihood of investing in biodiversity conservation.