재무적 제약기업의 ESG 등급 최초공개가 기업가치에 미치는 영향 = Effects of the Financially Constrained Companies’ Initial ESG Score Announcement on the Firm Value

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

[Purpose]Capital markets and prior studies generally anticipate that ESG management to have a positive effect on companies, while skepticism about ESG is observed in the industry and the media. This study establishes and verifies the hypothesis that the financially constrained companies’ ESG score announcement may adversely affect corporate value.
[Methodology]Using a sample from 2013 to 2021, this study investigated whether financial constraints act as a common trait to initial ESG score announcement on top of other common factors. Next, this study empirically analyzes whether the impact of the initial announcement of the ESG score on the following year’s firm value is discriminatory depending on financial constraints.
[Findings]This study found the following results. First, the higher the level of financial constraints, the larger the size of the company, and the higher the profitability and revenue growth, the higher the probability of initial ESG score announcement in t＋1. Second, the initial announcement of the ESG score of financially constrained companies showed a significant negative relationship with the following year’s firm value. These results also maintain robustness in Heckman’s 2－stage analysis. Additional analyses reveal that these results were more clearly observed in the KOSDAQ compared to the KOSPI. Also, this study found economically and statistically more significant results in the period 2019－2021 than in 2013－2018.
[Implications]This study has academic, practical, and policy implications in that financial constraints act as incentives for companies to announce the ESG score for the first time while investors in the capital market evaluate the financially constrained companies’ initial announcement of ESG score as negative news.