Does it pay to be sustainable? Looking inside the black box of the relationship between sustainability performance and financial performance

Nazim Hussain, Ugo Rigoni and Elisa Cavezzali

Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 2018, vol. 25, issue 6, 1198-1211

Abstract: The last three decades have witnessed a huge amount of research exploring the linkage between companies' sustainability performance (SP), sustainability disclosure and financial performance (FP). Researchers have applied various methods and techniques to investigate this relationship, yet the results remain equivocal. In this article, we look inside this black box by considering various manifestations of sustainability practices and investigating their link with FP. We apply a manual content analysis technique to analyse the sustainability reports of the 100 best‐performing US firms. Our results reveal that fragmentation in the results is caused by the SP measurement. Additionally, we note that the interlinkages between different SP dimensions and sub‐dimensions are weak and somewhat contradictory. The results help draw important policy implications for the development of an SP reporting framework.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (72)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.1631

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:wly:corsem:v:25:y:2018:i:6:p:1198-1211

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().