The walking dead: Are Zombie firms environmentally and socially responsible? A global perspective

Research
Corporate and Market Finance, Sustainable Development and CSR

205 vues

This study examines the association between zombie firms and their environmental and social performance. Using a global dataset of listed firms from 49 countries between 2002 and 2019, we find that zombie firms perform poorly on environmental and social responsibility fronts. This finding supports the argument that zombie firms are characterized by consistent losses and that their existence is risky without external support. Zombie firms, while struggling for survival, may not be able to undertake environmental and social activities that require huge investments, thus falling behind other firms. Further analysis highlights that eco-innovation, the presence of a sustainability committee, and industry nature (i.e., heavily polluting industries) mitigate the negative impact of firms’ zombie status on their environmental and social performance. Moreover, a zombie firm’s engagement in environmental and social activities improves its financial performance. Our main findings are robust to a battery of estimation techniques, alternative proxies, selection bias, and endogeneity issues.

Liens et ressources

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2024.120499

Mots clés

Environment, Environmental responsibility, Heavily polluting industry, social responsibility, Zombie firm

Auteur.e(s)

MASHWANI Asad Iqbal
Assistant Professor
EDC Business School

Institution(s)

Vidéos de la même institution

02:43

What is the Initial Coin Offering?

An Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is a modern fundraising method for start-ups, similar to crowdfunding but using digital tokens instead of traditional cash or rewards. Investors purchase these tokens, which they can later use to buy the product or resell for potential profit. ICOs provide entrepreneurs with a global financing opportunity while offering investors early access to innovative projects. Overall, ICOs connect entrepreneurship, finance, and blockchain technology, making them a revolutionary tool for start-up funding.

DELL’ERA Michele - EDC Business School |

Management Dictionary
Corporate and Market Finance, Entrepreneurship

03:38

Green Investing: Balancing Performance and Resilience

This study investigates how green investment assets improve optimal portfolio diversification in terms of tail downside risk. We use the wavelet conditional value-at-risk ratio to explore the benefits of adding green assets to conventional portfolios. We quantify risk based on the contagion between conventional stock market indices and green environmental assets, including a sustainability index, clean energy, and green bonds. Our findings emphasize the high variance between conventional stock pairs, providing evidence of contagion effects before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that including clean energy and green bond indices in conventional portfolios reduces the extreme risk of portfolios. In addition, we find that the diversification benefits of clean energy, green bonds, and safe-haven investments apply especially in the short term during the pandemic. Finally, we show that the considered portfolios could not decrease long-term risk during the COVID-19 crisis because of the systematic risk spread. Our portfolio optimization design supports the superiority of clean energy and green bonds in portfolio diversification over the sustainability index. These insights can be used by portfolio managers to inform diversification in different investment horizons.

FTITI Zied - |

Research
Corporate and Market Finance

03:44

Climate Risk: Does Perception Really Matter?

Increasing awareness of climate change and its potential consequences on financial markets has led to interest in the impact of climate risk on stock returns and portfolio composition, but few studies have focused on perceived climate risk pricing. This study is the first to introduce perceived climate risk as an additional factor in asset pricing models. The perceived climate risk is measured based on the climate change sentiment of Twitter dataset with 16 million unique tweets in the years 2010–2019. One of the main advantages of our proxy is that it allows us to capture both physical and transition climate risks. Our results show that perceived climate risk is priced into S&P 500 Index stock returns and is robust when different asset-pricing models are used. Our findings have implications for market participants, as understanding the relationship between perceived climate risk and asset prices is crucial for investors seeking to navigate the financial implications of climate change, and for policymakers aiming to promote sustainable financing and mitigate the potential damaging effects of climate risk on financial markets, and a pricing model that accurately incorporates perceived climate risk can facilitate this understanding.

FTITI Zied - |

03:51

Monetary policy impact on corporate carbon footprint

This study aims to investigate the impact of monetary policy on firms' carbon emissions. The primary focus is on the effect of interest rates on the carbon footprint of companies. The results show that there is a positive relationship between interest rates and carbon emissions indicating that in the face of increasing interest rates, companies are more likely to choose short-term financial stability above long-term sustainability objectives. This positive relationship is less prevalent following the Paris Agreement suggesting that policymakers should continue to strengthen global climate initiatives as a pressure for companies to invest in green activities. Additional evidence suggests that the impact of interest rates on carbon emissions is particularly noticeable in situations characterized by elevated levels of economic and policy uncertainty, weak corporate governance quality, and poor investor protection.

GUIZANI Assil - EDC Business School |

Research
Covid Special Series, Sustainable Development and CSR

Vidéos de la même thématique

What is the Initial Coin Offering?

DELL’ERA Michele - EDC Business School |

Management Dictionary
Corporate and Market Finance, Entrepreneurship

Environmental Tax Policies in Emerging Markets: Does Confidence in Political Institutions Matter?

The goal of this study is to examine how environmental taxes influence the comparative advantage in environmental products and carbon emissions within emerging economies. To gain a better understanding, we examine whether this impact changes depending on the level of government integrity. The results indicate that increased environmental taxes mitigate the comparative advantage in environmental goods for emerging markets. However, for countries with high levels of government integrity, higher environmental taxes enhance their competitive edge in environmental goods. Additionally, our findings show that although a rise in environmental taxes is associated with higher carbon emissions, raising such taxes results in a reduction in carbon emissions for emerging economies with solid government integrity. These findings suggest that robust political institutions are crucial in promoting the comparative advantage of emerging markets in environmental goods and mitigating climate change. In the absence of substantial confidence in political or governmental institutions, the efficient implementation of climate taxes poses considerable challenges. Furthermore, we observe that an increase in the comparative advantage of environmental goods results in a decrease in carbon emissions.

KOCAARSLAN Baris - EDC Business School |

Research
Corporate and Market Finance

In Machine Learning We Trust: A Bankruptcy Prediction Application

Recently, ensemble-based machine learning models have been widely adopted and have demonstrated their effectiveness in bankruptcy prediction. However, these algorithms often function as black boxes, making it difficult to understand how they generate forecasts. This lack of transparency has led to growing interest in interpretability methods within artificial intelligence research. In this paper, we assess the predictive performance of Random Forest, LightGBM, XGBoost, and NGBoost (Natural Gradient Boosting for probabilistic prediction) on French firms across various industries, with a forecasting horizon of one to five years. We then apply Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), a model-agnostic interpretability technique, to explain XGBoost, one of the best-performing models in our study. SHAP highlights the contribution of each feature to the model’s predictions, enabling a clearer understanding of how financial and macroeconomic factors influence bankruptcy risk. Moreover, it allows for the explanation of individual predictions, making black-box models more applicable in credit risk management.

NGUYEN Hoang Hiep - EM Normandie |

Research
Corporate and Market Finance

Less marketing for a better world !

Marketing seems to be slow to fully recognize its role, place and responsibility in changes in climate, biodiversity and resources. This reluctance can be attributed, at least in part, to the implicit assumptions of sustainable marketing, which tend to minimize the scale of the paradigm shifts needed to remain hopeful of a habitable planet. Consequently, the dominant approaches to “sustainable marketing” find it difficult to question the fundamental principles and ideological foundations of the market system. This is why we are calling for radical changes in marketing research in order to envisage a truly sustainable future. We are therefore formulating a program based on five proposals with the aim of inviting profound transformations in the discipline.

ARNOULD Eric - FNEGE |

Research
Marketing, Sales and Communication, Sustainable Development and CSR

Corporate and Market Finance

Sustainable Development and CSR

The walking dead: Are Zombie firms environmentally and socially responsible? A global perspective

Auteur.e(s)

Institution(s)

Vidéos de la même institution

Vidéos de la même thématique

S'abonner aux vidéos FNEGE MEDIAS