Influence of ESG on corporate resilience in hyper-uncertainty markets like early COVID-19

Abstract

Recently companies are complying with ESG, a social responsibility, and corporate stakeholders are using it as a standard for corporate evaluation. In a situation where unexpected social and economic uncertainty is rapidly increasing, corporate managers expect that ESG activities will increase their organizational resilience. In this study, we test whether Korean companies’ ESG activities affect their resilience in a market with increased uncertainty by the outbreak of COVID-19. We analyze the relationship between ESG ratings and corporate stock values and volatility for 640 companies listed in the KOSPI and KOSDAQ at a time when the financial market collapsed due to the initial spread of COVID-19. We find that the governance(G) index and the economic value of a company had a positive correlation and the social(S) index had a negative relationship. In the case of Korea, since active discussion on ESG began from 2020, the effect of ESG was not significant compared to overseas cases.