Tan, DavidPrabhu, Sanjana Ganesh2025-08-012025-08-012025Prabhu_washington_0250E_28382.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/53436Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025A fundamental question in non-market strategy literature is how firms engage with non-market actors to avoid accountability for socially costly activities and outputs. While the literature has explored tactics like cooperation, lobbying, compliance, and voluntary disclosures, it has largely ignored the use of comparatively antagonistic tactics such as suppression. This dissertation explores the threat of suppression tactics and how this threat affects the generation (or abatement of generation) of environmental negative externalities. Across three empirical chapters, I focus on how the threat of litigation, in particular, influences the generation of a relatively well-studied externality: toxic waste. In the first chapter, I examine whether firms change how toxic waste is managed when they have less power to threaten stakeholders through litigation. I find that, following the introduction of constraints on the ability to effectively use litigation to stifle dissent, facilities shift how the toxic waste generated through the production process is managed rather than the overall generation of that waste. I find that the shift in how waste is managed is driven by the expected stakeholder concerns and the potential to shift liability. In chapter 2, I continue my examination of the effect of the introduction of constraints on the ability to effectively use litigation as a suppression topic. In this chapter, I leverage the fact that these constraints are introduced at different times at a state level and examine how firms leverage that heterogeneity across jurisdictions. I focus specifically on how this heterogeneity affects the movement of waste from the source locations to other offsite locations. I find that following the introduction of constraints on the effectiveness of litigation as a suppression tactic, facilities significantly increase the transfer of waste to locations without those constraints and significantly decrease the transfer of waste to locations with these constraints. This suggests that facilities leverage the state-level heterogeneity in the introduction of these constraints and engage in regulatory arbitrage. In chapter 3, I move away from the context of constraints on the effectiveness of litigation as a suppression tactic and focus on the threat of litigation itself. I explore how regulatory scrutiny may lead to unintended consequences and how prior filings of litigation may be perceived by the firm as a barrier to regulatory scrutiny. I leverage county-level designation data based on the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for ground ozone. I find that following increased regulatory scrutiny related to ground ozone, facilities significantly increase the generation of pollutants that are not associated with the scrutiny. I do not find that the prior filings of litigation influence the generation of non-ozone-related pollution following increased scrutiny. Together, these chapters examine how the threat of litigation may be perceived as a means to suppress dissent and how the costs associated with that threat affect the generation and management of negative externalities.application/pdfen-USnoneEnvironmental Negative ExternalitiesLitigationNon-Market StrategyStakeholder ManagementStakeholder SuppressionManagementBusiness administrationThesis