Patricia Breuer
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Informed management?
Monday, October 6, 2025 –05:15 – 06:30 PM (CEST)
This session will be held as a hybrid event. To join in person, you can come to room O 131 (i.e., room 131 on level 1 of the east wing of the castle). To join virtually, please register in advance using this link.
Seminar Abstract
Corporate activity is a major contributor to environmental pollution, so much is known. The extent to which individual firms affect the environment, however, remains relatively unclear, possibly even to firms’ management. As a result, the growing efforts to collect information on firms’ environmental footprints – e.g., motivated by external reporting requirements or driven by independent monitoring initiatives (e.g., Climate TRACE) – may help firms’ management incorporate environmental considerations more efficiently in their decision making. Whether this hope is justified remains unclear though.
We attempt to inform on the promise of information-collection initiatives that provide firms with information on their environmental footprints. Using a survey experiment administered to millions of firms via email, we collect information on firms’ beliefs about their environmental footprints and randomly inform a subset of the firms about our independent estimates of their footprints. We explore whether firms’ beliefs align with their actual footprints, whether firms update their beliefs when presented with diverging footprint information, and whether firms (updated) beliefs influence their actions, including their decision to disclose their footprint, their (stated) intention to change their environmental footprint, and their observed operational actions and environment footprint.
Speaker Bio
Patricia Breuer is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the intersection of financial reporting, regulation, and sustainability, with a particular emphasis on transparency and corporate behavior. Her work has been published in leading journals, including Science, and has garnered attention for its policy relevance and interdisciplinary approach.
Dr. Breuer earned her doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) from the University of Mannheim’s Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences. As part of her doctoral training, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and ESSEC Business School. Her academic journey also includes studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Maastricht University, and Texas A&M University.
She has presented her research at numerous international conferences and workshops, such as the London Business School Accounting Symposium, the Harvard Business School, and the Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association. In recognition of her contributions, she has received multiple awards, including the ESE Top Talent Researcher Award and the Karin-Islinger Award.
In addition to her research, Patricia Breuer teaches courses on data analytics and programming and is an active member of the TRR 266 Accounting for Transparency consortium.
Admission information
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