The impact of Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) practices on the financial performance of companies in emerging and frontier markets

Sammanfattning: In this thesis, we explore the proprietary Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) scores and analyze their impacts on firm valuation using the sample of 166 companies operating in 35 emerging and frontier markets. Three methods of ESG scores, Principal Component Analysis and regression analysis are used. The results indicate an economically significant relationship between the overall ESG measure and firm value mainly driven by the “Environmental” and “Capital allocation” sub-scores. An exploratory principal component analysis and an extensive list of firm characteristics is also employed in our regression analysis to address problems identified in previous studies - construct validity and endogeneity. The PCA revealed dominance of Environmental and Social components in the variance of the total ESG score. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses of proprietary ESG score and PCAderived index are recognized based on sector- and region level comparison and the opportunities to improve the ESG scorecard framework are identified.