 Sustainability Performance and Its Impact on Financial Distress Risk—Evidence From STOXX Europe 600Marcel Seefloth, Florian Siedler, Christoph Kayser, Benedikt T. Retsch and Henning Zülch Business Strategy and the Environment, 2025, vol. 34, issue 5, 5699-5741 Abstract: Sustainability performance (SP) has emerged as a central topic on both corporate and political agendas worldwide. This study investigated the relationship between SP and financial distress risk (FDR) among European listed firms, addressing the growing importance of SP in financial decision‐making. Utilising a panel dataset from LSEG Data & Analytics (formerly Refinitiv) for STOXX Europe 600 firms between 2016 and 2022, we performed regression analyses to examine the impact of SP on FDR, measured through alternating scores. In contrast to most existing research, we found SP to increase FDR for most analyses performed, with the effect varying by SP dimension. Because we found environmental and governance SP to increase FDR, we did not find an association between social SP and FDR in most analyses performed. Our findings provide practical and theoretical implications for firms, investors and policymakers concerning the influence of SP investments on FDR and potential SP overinvestments in Europe's latest sustainability regulatory setting. Date: 2025 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:34:y:2025:i:5:p:5699-5741 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Business Strategy and the Environment is currently edited by Richard Welford More articles in Business Strategy and the Environment from Wiley Blackwell |
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