Michael W. Toffel

Faculty Fellow, Harvard Environmental Economics Program Faculty Affiliate, Harvard University Center for the Environment Faculty Affiliate, Kennedy School of Government Center for Business and Government Regulatory Policy Program

Mike Toffel's research focuses on operational discipline by examining companies' environmental, occupational safety, and quality programs and performance. His work seeks to identify which types of programs distinguish participating companies as having superior environmental, safety, or quality management or performance, and which of these programs help companies improve their performance in these domains. His work ranges from academic articles based on econometric analyses of large datasets to case studies of individual companies. His work on quality management systems and environmental management systems has been profiled by LRQA Business Assurance, Quality Progress, and the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board. His research on occupational health and safety has been profiled by the head of U.S. OSHA and featured in the national press including US News & World Report, BusinessWeek, and Scientific American. His work on industry self-regulation has been profiled in HBS Working Knowledge.

Professor Toffel's research also examines information disclosure, and seeks to understand why some companies are more transparent than others. He is a co-founder of MapEcos, a mapping website that provided government pollution data about thousands of facilities across the US, and provides these facilities the opportunity to disclose information about their environmental management activities. MapEcos has been profiled in The Economist, CNN, the World Bank, and HBS Working Knowledge.

His articles have been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal (SMJ), Journal of Economics and Management Strategy (JEMS); Journal of Law, Economics and Organization (JLEO); California Management Review (CMR); Environmental Science & Technology (ES&T); and Journal of Industrial Ecology. Prof. Toffel serves on the Editorial Board of the Strategic Management Journal (SMJ).

His co-authors include Julia Adler-Milstein, Ronnie Chatterji, Magali Delmas, Andrew King, David Levine, Mike Lenox, Julian Marshall, Chris Marquis, Lamar Pierce, Tim Simcoe, Sara Singer, Jodi Short, David Vogel, as well as doctoral students Anil Doshi, Chonnikarn (Fern) Jira, Matthew Johnson, and Erin Reid.

He recommends Environmental Leader, Grist, Ethical Corporation, and SustainableBusiness.com to keep up on corporate environmental news.

Toffel is involved in several initiatives to foster top-quality research on corporate environmental and labor management practices. At Harvard, he is engaged in the HBS Business and Environment initiative and is a faculty affiliate of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and the Regulatory Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government's Center for Business and Government. He also serves as a founding board member and is on the executive board of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) that spans several leading universities. He has co-led the Harvard-MIT Private Governance Working Group.

Toffel has organized several conferences related to his research, conferences on corporate sustainability (2010), the role of information disclosure in corporate transparency and accountability (2009), business and human rights in operations and supply chains (2008), and industry self-regulation (2007) .

Professor Toffel received a Ph.D. from the Haas School of Business' Business and Public Policy department at the University of California at Berkeley, an MBA from the Yale School of Management, a Master’s in Environmental Management (Industrial Environmental Management) from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, and a BA in Government from Lehigh University. He has worked as the Director of Environment, Health and Safety at the Jebsen & Jessen (South East Asia) Group of Companies, based in Singapore. He has also worked as an environmental management consultant for Arthur Andersen, Arthur D. Little, and Xerox Corporation. He started his career as an operations management analyst at J.P. Morgan.

Disclosures: Prof. Toffel serves on the Advisory Panel of the Newsweek Green Rankings and on the School Site Council of Edward Devotion School, a public elementary school in Brookline, MA.

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