Corporate Environmental, Social, and Governance Performance: The Impacts on Financial Returns, Business Model Innovation, and Social Transformation

Stanislav Edward Shmelev () and Elisa Gilardi
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Stanislav Edward Shmelev: Environment Europe Foundation, Fluwelen Burgwal 58, The Hague Humanity Hub, 2511 CJ The Hague, The Netherlands
Elisa Gilardi: SAA School of Management, University of Turin, Via Ventimiglia, 115, 10126 Torino, Italy

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 3, 1-41

Abstract: Corporate sustainability performance becomes the central element in many current business developments: the total value of ESG investment grows, more and more clients want to invest in projects that deliver more than the pure financial return, companies are innovating and transforming their business models, and adopting the B-Corp values. Environmental and wider societal impact becomes the central focus of the businesses that want to become the force for good. This article adopts an empirical approach and builds an ESG index of corporate performance based on eight critical metrics representing the economic, social, and environmental dimensions under varying policy priorities. Furthermore, it investigates correlations between these aggregate ESG indices and share prices as well as return on investment, or ROE, of companies. The article goes on to investigate empirically the correlation between employees/turnover, diversity, CO 2 emissions, waste generation, and water use of companies and share prices and ROE metrics, respectively. The reasons for divergence between correlations of sustainability performance indicators with share prices, ROE, and profits/turnover are discussed in detail, with particular attention drawn to the reasons why diversity might matter more for the share prices than ROE and why waste generation, water use, and CO 2 emissions might still be poorly reflected in the ROE while some of these metrics have a significant connection with the profit/turnover ratio. The article will undoubtedly be of interest to ESG fund managers, investors, corporate sustainability officers, and policymakers.

Keywords: ESG; performance; indicator; corporate; ROE; share price; business; impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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