Search Results (6)

Growing regulatory, investor, and societal pressures have heightened the importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure as a key mechanism for corporate transparency and accountability, particularly in emerging markets. This study examines the relationship between ethical leadership and ESG disclosure among publicly listed companies in Saudi Arabia within the context of the Vision 2030 reforms. Drawing on ethical leadership theory and stakeholder theory, ethical leadership is conceptualized as an internal behavioral governance mechanism shaping firms’ sustainability reporting practices. The empirical analysis is based on panel data of 147 non-financial firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) from 2020 to 2024, yielding 735 firm-year observations. ESG disclosure was measured using Refinitiv ESG scores, whereas ethical leadership was captured using the CSRHub Ethical Leadership Index. Employing a random-effects panel regression model with firm-level clustered robust standard errors, the results reveal a positive and statistically significant association between ethical leadership and ESG disclosure. These findings indicate that leadership ethics play an important role in enhancing transparency and accountability in sustainability reporting, and offer relevant implications for corporate governance and ESG policy development in Saudi Arabia. Full article

This study examines the determinants of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance among Chinese financial institutions, with particular emphasis on community engagement, firm size, and ownership structure as drivers of ESG performance and their contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Utilizing ESG ratings from CSRHub and annual reports from 107 financial companies spanning 2022–2024, hierarchical regression analyses demonstrate that community engagement significantly predicts ESG performance (β = 0.816, p < 0.001), explaining 67.7% of the variance in ESG ratings. Conversely, the firm (β = 5.687 × 10⁻⁶, p > 0.05) and the ownership structure (β = 1.35, p > 0.05) exhibit no statistically significant effect. Robustness evaluations, concerning bootstrapping methodologies and calculations of heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors, check these findings. The cross-sectional design limits causal inference. Longitudinal studies would allow deeper exploration of temporal dynamics. The results specify that community engagement acts as the primary factor affecting ESG performance within Chinese financial institutions, whereas firm size and ownership structure exercise insignificant influence. Financial institutions should prioritize substantive, sustained community initiatives rather than relying on organizational scale or state affiliation. For policymakers, the findings suggest that incentive mechanisms (e.g., tax credits or green-finance subsidies) should reward verifiable community-impact outcomes rather than firm size or state ownership, which do not reliably predict superior ESG performance. Full article

Sustainability has become a significant concern worldwide in recent decades. There seems to be implicit competition among firms for better sustainability performance. Like any other firm activity, sustainability undertakings require resources and their efficient use to achieve the desired performance. Firms may hesitate to undertake sustainability initiatives due to the underlying costs, leading to the question of how efficient they are in their sustainability practices. Relying on data from CSRHub and COMPUSTAT, we employed data envelopment analysis to evaluate the sustainability efficiency of 1141 large U.S. manufacturing firms from 2009 to 2018. We measured the sustainability efficiency of each firm relative to those on the efficient frontier for all the firms in our sample and also separately for each industry. The analysis results indicate that firms’ sustainability efficiency varies across years and industries. Furthermore, we show a quadratic relationship between sustainability performance and sustainability efficiency. This finding implies a process that begins with firms struggling to streamline their sustainability efforts and decreasing their efficiency as sustainability performance increases. Sustainability efficiency starts increasing only after a certain threshold is reached in sustainability performance. Our findings offer valuable insights for firms and stakeholders in their efforts to achieve desired levels of sustainability efficiency. Full article

In today’s business environment, a debatable concern is increasing on the importance of ownership structure on corporate social responsibility (CSR). With the purpose of clarifying more about this nexus, the study utilizes ownership concentration, managerial ownership, government ownership, and foreign ownership for ownership structure representation and explores their relationship with CSR performance under the Vietnamese companies’ context. Agency theory is employed to explain how the concept is formulated and website information, annual reports and the CSRHub database are where this research is based for data collection. With 65 firms in the analysis at the beginning of October 2019, the empirical findings unveil that managerial and foreign ownership are positively related, while ownership concentration and government ownership are not significantly linked to CSR performance. Full article

Good sustainability decisions depend on how companies respond to wide-ranging exposure to exogenous and endogenous pressures. The purpose of the article was to determine whether companies in different industries respond differently to stakeholders’ pressures when prioritising Environmental, Social and Governance sustainability performance (ESG-SP) activities. Data of six sectors, with a total of 75 companies was extracted from the CSRHub database, which is a rating agency that focuses on assessing ESG performance of companies. The ANOVA, pairwise comparative and multiple comparison Tukey HSD tests were applied to compare mean scores across the sectors. Overall industry scores show no evidence of ESG-SP differences across industries in the sectors examined. It was however revealed that three (3) out of twelve ESG ratings have significant differences namely: Community Development and Philanthropy; Human Rights and Supply Chain; as well as Compensation and Benefits. The study found that the type of industry does not have a significant role in determining the ESG rating of a company. Future studies can look at a longitudinal analysis to shed light on the pattern of sustainability practices across companies that are listed on the JSE. Full article

There is a growing demand for sustainable business practices and for sustainable and impact investment as has been signaled by the Sustainable Development Goals ratified by all the United Nations members. However, there is not that much evidence on how sustainable investments perform during crises compared to regular investments. This paper investigates if sustainable investments within the NASDAQ have a lower volatility rate when reacting to a significant global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It groups the shares of businesses with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices that are ranked 70% or higher given by CSRHub, Inc. and compares it to business shares with the lowest-ranked CSR business practices at 30% or lower. The top 30% and bottom 30% CSR stocks’ volatility will be predicted using variations of the GARCH model. The top 30% CSR stocks of the NASDAQ had a lower rate of volatility for a global crisis than the bottom 30% CSR stocks. Technology is the only sector whose top 30% showed higher volatility. However, the top 30% of companies in the Health Care and Utilities sectors show a higher increase in returns and a lower drop in returns. These results signal the higher uncertainty associated with some cutting-edge products and services offered by the top 30% of technology companies and the preference for more established companies that offer higher quality services when it comes to satisfying basic needs such as health and utilities in difficult times. Full article