A systematic literature review of US environmental violation studies

Purpose This paper aims to review existing studies on environmental violations, identifying well-developed and less-developed topics, as well as influential and less influential themes within this research area. Additionally, it highlights emerging topics that future research can explore. Design/methodology/approach A search was conducted in the Web of Science on the topic “environmental violations”. Papers with the highest citations were exported and then manually filtered. The additional 27 papers were identified by following Janssen et al.’s (2007) cited reference search methodology. These 9,568 selected papers were then categorised into 8 themes. “Biblioshiny” was also used to assess the development and influence of these eight themes and to identify emerging trends among them. Findings This paper groups existing studies regarding to “environmental violations” into eight groups which are “efficiency of enforcement”, “regulation tools”, “enforcement strategy”, “self-reporting”, “inspection types and frequency”, “impact of environmental violation events on firms”, “reputation”, “environmental violation in supply chains” and “corporate governance in the context of environmental violations”. This paper identifies four emerging themes: Design of accounting information systems to improve corporate environmental compliance by applying machine learning, identification/detecting environmental violations and the challenges of detecting and adopting new methodologies to evaluate the impact of events in event studies given the complexity of environmental violations that often take a long time to resolve and involve multiple discrete event days and assessing methodologies for measuring intangible assets in research streams that use intangible asset losses to evaluate event impacts. Originality/value This paper summarises existing research on environmental violations and identifies research gaps for future scholars to explore.