Lönsamt att vara hållbar? : en eventstudie om ESG-nyheters påverkan på företags avkastning

Sammanfattning: Sustainability is a common term in media and aims to take care of your own needs without compromising for future generations. ESG (environmental, social and governance) origins from CSR and SRI and is an important term in capital markets because of a new EU-directive was introduced in 2017.   The aim of this event study is to determine if the release of ESG-news have a significant impact on stock returns on companies listed on OMX30. This study includes news that were released from the year 2010 to April 2019 on the Swedish market OMX30. To test the hypothesis of this study, 199 news were selected, and the abnormal return was calculated on the event day.   The result of the hypothesis testing shows that only the environmental pillar shows a significant positive connection with return, while the social- and governance pillar does not. This study concludes that investors react strongly to negative ESG-news, and less positive to positive ESG-news. It can also be concluded that environmental news are what investors care most about.   Limitations of this study is that the selection of news was considered relatively small compared to earlier studies. If companies want to satisfy their stakeholders, extra focus should be addressed to these areas. The implication of this study is that investor care more about the environmental pillar then the other two pillars.