The life we considered normal was disrupted due to measures taken to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. Quarantine, isolation, social distancing, and community containment have influenced consumer behavior and contributed to the rapid development of e-commerce. In pandemic times, even those unfamiliar with the online environment have had to adapt and make acquisitions in this new manner. Hence, we focused our research on measuring the perception of consumers on how the restrictive measures imposed to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus had influenced their decision to buy a product or service from the online environment, given that purchases are highly subjective and influenced by cumulative effects of economic, social, psychological and behavioral factors. Our paper comes with additional insights from the literature. It adds empirical evidence that reveals that the number of transactions and the value per transaction increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlights that online purchases will continue as such even after the pandemic.
The paper examines how environmental, social, and governance (ESG), including management incentives, influence a firm’s financial performance. The study method is based on an empirical analysis of data describing firm-level information about corporate financial performance and corporate sustainability performance between 2001 and 2020, summing up 6291 observations related to 422 analyzed firms from the European Union (EU). The study findings emphasize that firm size is highly influenced by sustainable economic development and significantly conditioned by a CSR strategy and a capable management team. We also prove a long-term relationship between the measures of corporate financial performance and the scores reflecting corporate ESG performance. Our results show a co-integration relationship between corporate financial performance metrics and corporate sustainability performance scores. ESG corporate performance is highly conditioned by the level of resources affected for this purpose, directly impacting firms’ cash flow.
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