Faculty Author Type

Current Faculty [Galit A. Sarfaty]

Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

2017

Subjects

Human Rights; Supply Chain; Disclosure; Survey Experiment; Empirical Legal Research

Abstract

Although the past few decades have seen numerous cases of human rights violations within corporate supply chains, companies are frequently not held accountable for the abuses because there is a significant governance gap in the regulation of corporate activity abroad. In response, governments have begun to pass mandatory disclosure laws that require companies to release detailed information on their supply chains in the hopes that these laws will create pressure that will improve corporate accountability. In this paper, we argue that supply chain disclosure regimes are unlikely to have a large effect on consumer behavior, and as a result, their effectiveness at reducing human rights abuses will likely be limited. This is not only because scholarship on mandatory disclosure regimes in other areas has suggested that these regimes are frequently unsuccessful, but also because these problems are likely to be exacerbated in the human rights context. We argue that this is due to the fact that supply chain disclosures do not provide information on actual products, the information in the disclosures only provides weak proxies for human rights outcomes, and the risks associated with supply chains vary dramatically across industries. In order to test our argument, we engaged a leading market research firm to field a series of experiments that were designed to test how well consumers understand supply chain disclosures. In our experiments, the nationally representative sample of respondents consistently rated disclosures reporting low levels of due diligence almost as highly as disclosures that reported a high level of due diligence. Based on these results, we argue that consumer-oriented supply chain disclosure regimes designed to improve corporate human rights behavior should be reconsidered.

NOTE: The "Download" button above will provide access to a working draft, and the "Find in your Library" button below will provide access to the final published version.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.