The DOI matches its Crossref record; 36 of the 36 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
ESG did not immunize stocks during the COVID‐19 crisis, but investments in intangible assets did
Open accessAbstract
Environmental, social and governance (“ESG”) scores have been widely touted as indicators of share price resilience during the COVID‐19 crisis. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, we present robust evidence that once industry affiliation, market‐based measures of risk and accounting‐based measures of performance, financial position and intangibles investments have been controlled for, ESG offers no such positive explanatory power for returns during the COVID crisis. Specifically, ESG is insignificant in fully specified returns regressions for each of the Q1 2020 COVID market crisis period and for the full COVID year of 2020. By contrast, a measure of the firm's stock of investments in internally generated intangible assets is an economically and statistically significant positive determinant of returns during each of the Q1 market implosion and full 2020 COVID year periods. Our results are robust to alternative measures of returns, as well as for using Refinitiv, Refinitiv II and MSCI data to capture ESG performance. We conclude that ESG did not immunize stocks during the COVID‐19 crisis, but those investments in intangible assets did.
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Cites
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Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings
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Self-citationWhy and How Investors Use ESG Information: Evidence from a Global Survey
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Cited by
Investor rewards to environmental responsibility: Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis
Garel, A., & Petit-Romec, A. (2021) · Journal of Corporate Finance · doi:10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2021.101948 · Cited by 330
Does sustainability generate better financial performance? review, meta-analysis, and propositions
Atz, U., Van Holt, T., Liu, Z. Z., & Bruno, C. C. (2023) · Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment · doi:10.1080/20430795.2022.2106934 · Cited by 254
Metadata
- Authors
- Demers, E., Hendrikse, J., Joos, P., & Lev, B.
- Venue
- Journal of Business Finance & Accounting
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2021-03
- Volume
- 48
- Issue
- 3-4
- Pages
- 433-462
- ISSN
- 0306-686X (ISSN-L)
- 1468-5957
- OpenAlex
- W3139245849
- Cited by
- 441
- References
- 36
- FWCI
- 63.84
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
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- Demers, E., Hendrikse, J., Joos, P., & Lev, B. (2021). ESG did not immunize stocks during the COVID‐19 crisis, but investments in intangible assets did. Journal of Business Finance & Accounting. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbfa.12523
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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