tiemen

· 339 words · 2 minute read

Comments 🔗

  • Introduction: Did not pay attention to this aspect so far (my apologies), but probably, translate the newspaper header to English and use a footnote

  • Also: avoid emphasizing NOS - distracting and irrelevant for the larger part of your readers (I guess)

  • I am still missing a strong, basic economics argument in the introduction, along the lines of: profit-maximizing firms have an incentive to lie about their sustainable activity. Hence, they are greenwashing. But: to do greenwashing, they need politicians, and therefore, a possible means of paying politicians could be by offering generous donations

  • Also, maybe some more elaboration on the method by Ruiz-Blanco: how to measure discourse is more or less obvious, but can we easily observe actions? What are the assumptions?

  • This paragraph:

Scientific research is still divided whether political donations do indeed generate positive returns in the future (Aggarwal et al., 2012; Cooper et al., 2010).

on page 13 implies that donations are investments into the future. But, in my understanding, donations are a payment for politicians cooperating and facilitating companies' greenwashing activities. That is a second perspective according to which the hypothesis can be posed.

  • Methodology section looks good

  • Small details: regression model not fully correctly defined on page 19

  • Second hypothesis can be ‘placebo tested’ by also looking at democrats instead of republicans

    • Done in table 6
    • Results are not as one-sided as you make it seem in your introduction, but also interpretation
    • The result is there for republican party, but also for democratic party

  • You can also run Linear probability models instead of logits (easier to interpret with interaction effects)

As shown by the amount of asterisks the relation between overall greenwashing and donations to the Democratic Party is statistically the most significant, the corresponding coefficient is however the lowest of the three.

  • P-values, not asterisks (colloquial)

  • Table 8: also make a version for the democratic party (placebo test)

  • Layout: we can discuss this during the meeting

  • Table 9: page 32 - I don’t get this fully yet. Also discuss during meeting