The relationship between corporate sustainable performance and corporate financial performance in an emerging market / Asmaa Hamdy Abdelaziz Mohamed ; Supervised Magdy Gamal Abdelkader , Kholoud Abdelkareem Mahmoud Hussein

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Commerce - Department of Accounting

Sustainability has gained considerable interest from businesses, academics and in the press in the last two decades. Nowadays, listed companies around the world are shifting from short-term goals of maximizing profits to long-term sustainable environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. It has been realized that corporate sustainable performance (CSP) has become an important source of corporate risk and may affect corporate financial performance (CFP). Recent research shows that good CSP could improve CFP in some countries. Yet, the question of 2how does CSP affect CFP3 has not been thoroughly discussed and studied in Egypt. The main aim of this research is to explore the impact of CSP on CFP in the Egyptian stock market. Specifically, this research aims to investigate empirically: first; ex-post (abnormal) stock return related to ESG Index announcements, second; ex-post (abnormal) stock return related to the ESG Index announcements based on the industry perspective, third; the relationship of sustainability score (ESG) of company and its profitability, forth; whether ESG membership helps companies to improve their financial performance in comparison to EGX100.The empirical data were drawn from a sample of 895 observations for the period 2010-2018 in the Egyptian Stock Exchange. The event study methodology, mixed models and discriminant analysis are used to test the research hypotheses.The empirical results showed that there is a positive significant relationship between ESG inclusion announcements and the market based financial performance measured by the cumulative average abnormal return. Additionally, there was a significant negative relationship between ESG exclusion announcements and stock return. However, there was no significant relationship between ESG sustained announcements and stock return

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