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The purpose of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of the relationship between the social network profile of S&P1500 firms and their environmental and financial profiles. The three dimensions of this research are social network profile, financial profile and environmental profile, which are becoming increasingly interlinked. The nature of this research is multidisciplinary and still in its early stages. The existing studies focus mainly on two streams of research, the first of which explores the relationship between firms' environmental and financial profiles, which reveals contradictory results. The second research stream investigates the impact of the social networks between directors on the firms' financial profiles. This thesis is submitted in an alternative format and includes four journal papers, which are interrelated in addressing the purpose of this thesis. First, it is essential to provide effective reviews to create a foundation for developing knowledge in this field of research and to explore the area in which more research is required. Therefore, the first two papers attempt to review systematically the existing research streams, namely: (i) the impact of social network profile on financial profile; and (ii) the relationship between environmental profile and financial profile. Second, the review of the impact of social network profile on financial profile reveals the need to investigate social networks in the organisations from a social network theory perspective. Therefore, the third paper uses quantitative method to provide a concrete definition of social networks and social network centrality metrics in the context of organisations. In addition, a clear process for extracting social networks at both director and board levels from the directors' information repository is defined. Third, through the fourth paper, this thesis explores the impact of the board's roles on environmental governance as an essential component of environmental profile. This paper uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The roles of the board of directors in relation to environmental profile are twofold, namely board monitoring and board resource provision. In this work, the board's social network is examined as a board resource-provision role.

The high temporal resolution data created by smart metering, which has now been deployed in many countries, provides an unprecedented opportunity to examine household consumption behaviour in narrow time windows, whereas past studies could only look at monthly or even yearly consumption. However, most studies that have used smart meter data focused either on load management (load forecasting, theft detection, etc.) or linked electricity usage to demographic and/or building characteristics. Few studies have been conducted on the impacts of weather on intraday consumption behaviour. Better appreciation of the influence of weather could improve pricing designs as well as provide better understanding of household behaviour, which could, for example, potentially increase energy efficiency. With knowledge of weather effects on residential consumption, it could also be valuable for utilities to improve grid stability and reduce operation cost. To fill the gap, this dissertation analyses the impact of different weather variables as well as consumption patterns through different tools based on smart metering data. This thesis uses a three article format. Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the literature on smart meters and empirical studies using smart metering data. Chapter 2 presents an econometric analysis of the effect of weather factors in Ireland (such temperature, rainfall and sun duration) at different periods of a day, and contrasts the impacts on consumption for workdays versus weekends versus holidays. Chapter 3 employs machine learning methods - clustering algorithms - to categorise households by their electricity demand response to different weather variables. The results demonstrated that some weather sensitivity patterns are closely associated with household characteristics. In Chapter 4, smart meter data was gathered from a very different location, Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in China, which has more extreme weather and greater variability. Three scenarios are analysed in Chapter 4: (1) weekly consumption profiles in different seasons; (2) festival (major holiday) consumption profiles; and (3) consumption patterns during extreme weather. Finally, the thesis is concluded by Chapter 5, which summarises the main empirical and methodological contributions of the three papers and lays out future work in this area.