UCLA

Sustainability disclosures are more common than ever. Yet whether they are actually useful remains an open question. This dissertation examines that question across three studies spanning different audiences, methods, and sustainability domains.The first study systematically reviews how business journal articles engage with third-party sustainability measures in sustainability-financial performance linking research. The review identifies two sources of uncertainty that limit confidence in these measures: the quality of underlying data and how data is aggregated. Methodological rigor is bimodal; researchers either scrutinize multiple dimensions of measurement quality or none at all, and choices about data quality and aggregation are shown to be related to reported financial performance relationships. The study offers practical recommendations for improving rigor and transparency in corporate sustainability research. The second study examines how job applicants price corporate sustainability signals as part of their compensation using a choice-based conjoint experiment (N = 249) analyzed via Hierarchical Bayes. Drawing on Herzberg's hygiene-motivator distinction, the study finds two distinct asymmetries. Within domains, penalties for withdrawal exceed rewards for proactive investment. Across domains, climate commitments tied to managerial incentives generate a reliable compensation discount while equivalently structured diversity commitments do not. These patterns are consistent with diversity functioning as hygiene factor and climate functioning as prestige motivators. The third study employs a randomized between-subjects survey experiment with 516 retail investors to examine whether financial or impact framing of corporate sustainability strategies shifts investor sustainability judgments. Despite perceiving financial framing, retail investors showed no meaningful differences in perceived importance ratings or investor materiality assessments across framing conditions. Political ideology emerged as the dominant predictor of sustainability importance judgments and the strongest covariate predictor of investor materiality assessments, replicating across three independent samples. The findings challenge the assumption embedded in global disclosure frameworks that strategic framing shapes how retail investors receive sustainability information. Across three audiences and three methods, the dissertation finds that sustainability information does not operate uniformly. Its usefulness depends on who receives it, how it is disaggregated, and what psychological register it activates. These findings carry direct implications for how sustainability measures are constructed, disclosed, and regulated.