An analysis on the bidirectional causal relationship between ESG performance and corporate financial performance of publicly-listed companies under sensitive industries in the ASEAN-4 emerging countries

• Main Authors: Beltrano, Sophia Marie Regencia, Follosco, Sophia Rose Samonte, Saraza, Ronnie Angelic Oliva, Vinson, Jewel Almodiel
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Accounting; Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics; Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdb_acc/37; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1076&context=etdb_acc
• Institution: De La Salle University

With the rise of sustainable investments, the environmental, social, and governance performance (ESGP) of firms has been used to measure sustainability, and its influence on corporate financial performance (CFP) has been an interest of many studies. However, no conclusive evidence can be obtained from extant literature, which primarily focuses on the unidirectional ESGP-CFP relationship in developed economies. This study therefore aims to investigate the bidirectional ESGP-CFP relationship among publicly-listed companies in the ASEAN-4 emerging countries. Sensitive industries are also given focus due to their societal impacts. Using panel vector autoregression, some significant findings were revealed: a) for the ESGP-CFP link, an increase in ESGP may lead to an increase in market performance which reflects a firm’s current value and future prospects; and b) for the CFP-ESGP nexus, an increase in accounting performance based on historical financial data may lead to an increase in ESGP but an inverse impact is found in terms of market performance. Despite this, the study concluded that none of the variables ultimately impact the other as per the Granger causality test. A cross-country analysis, on the other hand, produced four significant, causal relationships. Since ESG reporting is in its infancy in the region, discrepancies between the overall ASEAN-4 and cross-country results may be attributed to the investment culture and ESG reporting practices in each of the sampled countries.