Association between Earnings Announcement Behaviors and ESG Performances

Despite the rapidly growing interest in ESG business management, it is not easily attainable for stakeholders to accurately assess the quality of the ESG activities of a firm due to several problems, including the exaggeration or greenwashing of the real ESG performance. This study investigates whet...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability 2023-05, Vol.15 (9), p.7733
Main Authors: Kim, Joonhyun, Lee, Yunkyeong
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accounting
Behavior
Business administration
Corporate governance
Decision making
False information
Financial reporting
Forecasts and trends
Greenwashing
Hypotheses
Information sources
Quality assessment
Social responsibility
Sustainability
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Despite the rapidly growing interest in ESG business management, it is not easily attainable for stakeholders to accurately assess the quality of the ESG activities of a firm due to several problems, including the exaggeration or greenwashing of the real ESG performance. This study investigates whether managerial opportunism, as revealed by earnings announcement behaviors, can be utilized as a hallmark to forecast the quality of ESG performance. Based on the tests using Korean firms, the empirical results show that opportunistic behaviors for earnings announcement announcements, such as the announcement on Friday, after market closing, and omitting preliminary earnings disclosure, are all negatively associated with the ESG performance score on an individual and also collective basis. Further analysis shows that firms with opportunistic strategies for earnings announcement tend to miss the disclosure on ESG activities as well. In sum, this study contributes to future research and policy-making by suggesting a new practical approach to analyzing the earnings announcement behaviors as a quick test to verify the corporate ESG performance.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su15097733