ESG in Focus: The Australian Evidence

Jeremy Galbreath ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2013, vol. 118, issue 3, 529-541

Abstract: Addressing ESG issues has become a point of interest for investors, shareholders, and governments as a risk management concern, while for firms it has become an emerging part of competitive strategy. In this study, a database from an independent ratings agency is used to examine, longitudinally, how Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) 300 firms are responding to ESG issues. Following institutional theory predictions, ASX300 firms are improving ESG performance over the 2002–2009 timeframe. Furthermore, over this timeframe, performance on the governance dimension improved at a greater rate than environmental or social performance, as predicted. Lastly, high impact industries are predicted to demonstrate overall improved ESG performance relative to medium or low impact industries over the timeframe, but this hypothesis was not confirmed. Results are discussed along with implications and future research directions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Keywords: Australia; Environmental; ESG; Governance; Social; Institutional theory; Stakeholders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (101)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-012-1607-9 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:jbuset:v:118:y:2013:i:3:p:529-541

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-012-1607-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().