ESG controversies and profitability in the European banking sector

Paolo Agnese, Massimiliano Cerciello, Raffaele Oriani and Simone Taddeo

Finance Research Letters, 2024, vol. 61, issue C

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the relationship between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Controversies and bank profitability. We analyze an unbalanced panel sample of European banks between 2015 and 2022, implementing the GMM-SYS version of the Arellano-Bond estimator for dynamic panels. The study results indicate that banks featuring more ESG controversies perform better in terms of Return on Assets (ROA), Return on Equity (ROE), and Net Interest Margin. This sheds light on the potentially opportunistic behavior of credit institutions, which appear to prioritize profitability over ESG Controversies.

Keywords: European banks; Bank profitability; ESG controversies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 G21 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612324000722
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:finlet:v:61:y:2024:i:c:s1544612324000722

DOI: 10.1016/j.frl.2024.105042

Access Statistics for this article

Finance Research Letters is currently edited by R. Gençay

More articles in Finance Research Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().