How News Reports and ESG Publication Financially Affect Firms

Abstract

ESG has become a growing and integral part of company activities. Not only is it something investors now take into consideration when choosing stocks, but the question of a firm’s Environmental, Social and Governance awareness and actions has integrated itself into something as critical as some banks’ decisions to provide loans to a firm. While ESG used to bejust a “nice-to-have,” there is no denying that it is now a must-have for any company that wants to be a global market leader.
 Many prior studies have focused on ESG ratings, the types of ESG information disclosed in annual reports and the effect of financial news on firms. The aim of this research is to take a deeper look at the effect of ESG on firms and find out whether different news feed and news publications concerning a company’s ESG activities and circumstances affect its value? Our research shows that there is a weakly significant effect of negative ESG-related news on firms in the window (–1, +1) and no significant reaction to positive news. This means that investors do not statistically significantly react to positive ESG news about firms. We examined 65 publicly traded companies from 7 different markets worldwide over the course of 13 years (from 2009 to 2021). We collected a total of 458 separate news articles from the S&P Global Market Intelligence platform –and classified them into positive and negative depending on the news. We ran OLS regressions of the data points together with financial control variables on a company’s CAR in a 5-, 3- and 2-day interval to check for the effect. No significant effect was reported.