EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Embedding sustainability in risk management: The impact of environmental, social, and governance ratings on corporate financial risk

Giovanni Catello Landi, Francesca Iandolo, Antonio Renzi and Andrea Rey

Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 2022, vol. 29, issue 4, 1096-1107

Abstract: This study investigates the effect of corporate social and environmental evaluation on investors' risk perception to explore the potential market risk for public companies that adopt a sustainable and responsible corporate strategy. We referred to the triple corporate assessment according to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria to check whether ESG factors—meant to direct firms toward social and environmental needs—improve corporate market performance or trigger, among investors, a perception of “window dressing.” In doing so, we tested the impact of corporate social performance—proxied by an ESG assessment—on corporate financial risk using double risk measurement. We conducted a five‐year longitudinal study (fiscal years 2014–2018) of 222 companies listed on the Standard & Poor's index. The empirical findings show higher investor uncertainty regarding corporate sustainability performance, probably due to the misalignment of objectives between investors and investees. Indeed, an overall ESG assessment corresponds to higher systematic risk for firms, and a corporate environmental rating has an upward effect on the same risk dimension.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/csr.2256

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:29:y:2022:i:4:p:1096-1107

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:wly:corsem:v:29:y:2022:i:4:p:1096-1107