Purpose Under Opportunities and Pressure - Product Price Responses Of B-Corporations To Certification and COVID-19
This thesis examines whether B Corp certification shapes product-market pricing behavior using high-frequency retail scanner data from the Numerator consumer panel linked to the B Lab certification registry. While existing research on certified B Corporations has focused predominantly on organizational outcomes including sales growth, profitability, and financial resilience, item-level pricing decisions have remained empirically unexamined. Two related studies address this gap, each applying a two-stage multilevel matching design followed by event-study estimation with item and pair-by-month fixed effects. Study 1 asks whether B Corp certification generates a detectable short-run price effect at the item level. The final matched sample comprises 74 entity pairs and 4,228 item pairs across Food and Beverages, Personal Care, and Vitamins and Supplements. Results are null: post-certification estimates remain economically small and statistically insignificant across the full twelve-month window. Study 2 exploits the COVID-19 pandemic as a common external shock to ask whether B-Corp and matched non-B-Corp products responded differently to supply- and demand-side disruption. The final matched sample comprises 52 entity pairs and 3,514 item pairs, dominated by Food and Beverages. Results show a positive and persistent price differential: B-Corp items were priced significantly higher than matched controls across most of the twelve-month post-shock window. A post-effect heterogeneity analysis further shows this differential is driven specifically by firms with higher Workers BIA scores, approximately two percentage points per standard deviation, while Community and overall scores show no predictive relationship. Together, the findings suggest that B Corp certification does not function as a short-run pricing lever at the moment of certification, but that labor commitments formalized through the Workers dimension of the BIA shape how certified firms translate external cost shocks into retail prices