Environmental, social, and governance and company profitability: Are financial intermediaries different?
This paper investigates the association between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure and company profitability, as measured by return on assets (ROA). We first assess a method to indexing the ESG score of a large sample of U.S. listed companies based on MSCI ESG KLD STATS data from 2000 to 2016. The statistical model is run on 17,358 observations and studies the association of ROA and the three different dimensions of ESG score. Significant differences between industrial firms and financial intermediaries emerge.