Environmental responsibility of banks versus their financial efficiency. Evidence from the Warsaw Stock Exchange

Abstract

The significance of our research is connected with the many regulations in the European Union concerning ESG issues. These documents are very often related to environmental aspects and concern banks as public trust entities. We focus on banks on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE), which constitute the main part of the Polish banking sector. We examine the relationship between financial efficiency and environmental responsibility in the banking sector. We identified three objectives for our research: first: to assess financial efficiency in the banks under study, second: to assess eco-management in banks listed on the WSE, third: to investigate whether there is a relationship between environmental responsibility as an ESG element of banks and their financial efficiency. The above objectives correspond with the research hypothesis adopted: Among the banks analysed, there is a correlation between a bank's financial performance and the Bank Ecologisation Index (BEI-2). This study refers to the period 2019-2021 to show the influence of the Covid-19 pandemic. We adopt various research methods to measure the environmental responsibility of banks and to examine the relationship between ecological engagement and banks’ financial ratios. In our research, we use descriptive statistics, linear ordering methods, standardised sum methods, synthetic measures of development, box plots, and analysis of the financial and non-financial reports of the entities analysed. The paper consists of five parts: introduction, literature review and research goals, materials and methods, results and discussion, and conclusions. Our results show that among the banks analysed, there is no statistically significant correlation between financial results and the Bank Ecologisation Index (BEI-2). This may be due to the fact that, as a result of the economic instability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, banks in Poland have slowed down their growth potential and investments in greening have shifted to the longer-term perspective.