Faculty and Research

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

Research

Professor Toffel conducts research on corporate environmental sustainability and examines companies' environmental, safety, and quality programs. His work seeks to identify which voluntary programs and management standards actually 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 areas. His work ranges from academic articles based on econometric analyses of large datasets to case studies of individual companies.

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.org, a mapping website that provides 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 the 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. His research on industry self-regulation has been profiled in HBS Working Knowledge.

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

Teaching

Professor Toffel teaches Business and the Environment, an MBA elective course offered in the Fall term, and has taught a core MBA course on Technology and Operations Management.

Initiatives and conferences

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 Business and Environment initiative at HBS, co-leads the Harvard-MIT Private Governance Working Group, and is a faculty affiliate of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, 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 of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS) that spans several leading universities.  

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) .

Industry experience and education

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.

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.

Curriculum Vitae