The independent effects of environmental, social and governance initiatives on the performance of UK firms

Jacquelyn E Humphrey, Darren D Lee and Yaokan Shen
Additional contact information
Jacquelyn E Humphrey: School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Applied Statistics, Australian National University, Australia
Yaokan Shen: UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Australia

Australian Journal of Management, 2012, vol. 37, issue 2, 135-151

Abstract: We investigate the effect of environmental, social and governance factors on the financial performance of UK firms. We examine the three factors separately to disentangle the relation of each with performance. We find no difference in the performance of firms with high or low environmental, social or governance rankings. The firms also do not differ in their systematic risks, book-to-market ratios or momentum exposures. However, high-rated firms are consistently larger. Our findings demonstrate that UK investors can incorporate environmental, social or governance criteria into their investment strategies without incurring any significant cost (or benefit) in terms of risk or return.

Keywords: Best of Sector; corporate social performance; environment; governance; social; sustainability; UK (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0312896211410081 (text/html)

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:sae:ausman:v:37:y:2012:i:2:p:135-151

DOI: 10.1177/0312896211410081

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Australian Journal of Management from Australian School of Business
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().