Purpose-The ESG factor, which consists of environmental, social, and governance factors, represents the non-financial performance of a company. United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UN-PRI) invites investors to consider ESG issues when evaluating the performance of any company. Moreover, nowadays the contribution of corporations towards sustainable development is a major concern of investors, creditors, government, and other environmental agencies. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of ESG factors on the performance of Malaysian public limited companies in terms of profitability, firm value, and cost of capital. Design/methodology/approach-A total of 54 companies are selected from Bloomberg's ESG database that has complete ESG and financial data from 2010 to 2013. This study conducted panel data regressions such as the pooled OLS, fixed effect, and random effect. Findings-Based on the regression results, there is no significant relationship between individual and combined factors of ESG and firm profitability (i.e., ROE) as well as firm value (i.e., Tobin's Q). Moreover, individually, none of the factors of ESG is significant with the cost of capital (WACC), but the combined score of ESG positively and significantly influences the cost of capital (WACC) of a company. Practical implications-As this is a new study on Malaysia, the findings of this study will be useful to investors, SRI analysts, policy makers, and other related agencies. Originality/value-To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is among the first empirical study to examine the impact of ESG factors on the performance of Malaysian public limited companies in terms of profitability, firm value, and cost of capital.

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Despite a bourgeoning literature on the existence of a long-run relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, the findings have failed to establish clearly the direction of causation. A growing economy needs more energy, which is exacerbated by growing population. Evidence suggests that financial development can reduce overall energy consumption by achieving energy efficiency. Economic growth and energy consumption in Malaysia have been rising in tandem over the past several years. The three public policy objectives of Malaysia are: economic progress, population growth and financial development. It is of interest to the policymakers to understand the dynamic interrelation among the stated objectives. The paper implements Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration to examine the existence of a long-run relationship among the series: energy consumption, population, aggregate production, and financial development for Malaysia; and tests for Granger causality within the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM). The results suggest that energy consumption is influenced by economic growth and financial development, both in the short and the long-run, but the population-energy relation holds only in the long run. The findings have important policy implications for balancing economic growth vis-à-vis energy consumption for Malaysia, as well as other emerging nations.

Despite a bourgeoning literature on the existence of a long-run relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, the findings have failed to establish clearly the direction of causation. A growing economy needs more energy, which is exacerbated by growing population.

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