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This study aims to investigate the nexus among environmental, social and governance disclosure quality (ESGDQ), corporate governance (COG) and corporate social responsibility strategy (CSRS) in the context of ASEAN, a developing market. Furthermore, carbon emission (CAE) has been considered as a moderation component for the CSRS–ESGDQ link.

With strict selection criteria, five countries in the ASEAN region (ASEAN-5) were selected as the research sample frame, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Using the Thomson Reuters Eikon database, the initial sample included 4,735 listed companies in ASEAN-5. After a rigorous screening process, there were a total of 683 companies in the final sample with the 2018–2022 intervals.

By using maximum likelihood structural equation modeling, the finding indicates that COG and CSRS have a favorable effect on ESGDQ in the ASEAN-5 context. Furthermore, CAE plays an outstanding moderation role in the CSRS–ESGDQ link. The fundamental accounting standards are also identified as having an impact on ESGDQ.

The research points up the dominant role of internal components (i.e. COG, CSRS and CAE) and government factor (i.e. fundamental accounting standards) for the sustainable value (i.e. ESGDQ) of firms in ASEAN-5, a developing market. Thus, firm headers should inspect the performance of these internal components at a crucial interval to enhance their environmental, social and governance (ESG) behaviors and make them more sustainable. Furthermore, governments in ASEAN-5 should pay attention to developing areas that have low CAE and have a favorable influence on national sustainable development goals.

The findings of the research provide some social implications by pointing up important factors influencing sustainability practices, and understanding how ESG practices can be improved in developing countries.

The research enlarges ESG documentation by specifying the influences of internal components and government factor, as well as providing actual proof from developing regions. In addition, this study identifies the effectiveness of CAE as well as its moderating role in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the practices, processes and expertise embedded within Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) distinctively mediate the tensions between outcome payers’ competing and contradictory programmatic discourses.

We use qualitative research methods and employ concepts drawn from the governmentality literature to analyse interviews with SIB outcome payers.

SIBs are shown to challenge the degree of negative influence of biopolitics, neoliberalism and financialization by highlighting a broader and more holistic set of influences. SIB operations pre-empt and counteract perceived risks and are refined through a “learning by doing” effect. In contrast to other approaches to funding social interventions, the SIB structure attributes and independently validates outcomes. Payments to investors are based on the achievement of outcomes and are funded by the outcome payers. SIBs’ operational processes allow the responsibilities of the various parties to be explicitly assigned and contracted. The interests are aligned, yet the cultural differences harnessed.

This paper is one of the first to apply governmentality concepts to SIBs. By focusing on outcome payers, the paper provides new perspectives on the practices, processes and expertise of governing and the programmatic discourses of governing, as well as their relationship. The insights offered are supported by one of the largest and most diverse empirical SIB samples including 34 interviews where 43 individuals reflect on their experiences across 32 unique outcome payer organisations.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG) greenwashing is a form of social responsibility response that appears compliant but is substantively oppositional. As an abnormal social behavior, existing research has rarely focused on the deep-seated strategic logic behind ESG greenwashing. Business strategy emerges as the linchpin for companies undertaking a series of decision-making actions. Consequently, this research seeks to provide new insights into the strategic drivers behind corporate greenwashing and the role of institutional investors in mitigating these practices.

The research utilizes empirical analysis based on data from Chinese A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges from 2010 to 2022. ESG performance data is sourced from the Bloomberg ESG Disclosure Ratings and Thomson Reuters’ Asset4 database. Business strategy is assessed using six key indicators. The study employs institutional theory as the analytical framework, examining the impact of business strategy on ESG greenwashing and investigating the internal mechanisms driving these behaviors.

The study finds that compared with defender strategies, prospector strategies are more likely to lead to ESG greenwashing behavior. Specifically, aggressive business strategies tend to facilitate corporate ESG greenwashing. Mechanism analysis indicates that, compared to defenders, prospectors induce ESG greenwashing by increasing information asymmetry (reputation effect) and being constrained by financing limitations (profit-seeking effect). From an external governance perspective, this study finds that institutional investor ownership can mitigate the impact of business strategy on ESG greenwashing. Furthermore, additional research confirms that in heavily polluting industries, the positive effect of business strategy on ESG greenwashing is more pronounced, whereas implementing the Environmental Protection Tax Law curtails the impact of business strategy on ESG greenwashing.

This study analyzes the role of business strategy in ESG greenwashing, particularly in the context of emerging economies such as China, contributing uniquely to the literature on corporate decision-making and green management. The research extends the application of institutional theory to the field of corporate environmental strategy and introduces the concepts of reputation and profit-seeking effects, offering fresh perspectives on understanding ESG greenwashing behavior. It also provides empirical evidence of the governance role of institutional investors in addressing managerial opportunism related to ESG greenwashing, enriching the existing theoretical framework. Finally, the study highlights the need to establish stronger institutional and managerial mechanisms to effectively tackle corporate greenwashing, offering valuable insights for future research and practice.

As financial markets for environmentally friendly investment grow in both scope and size, analyzing the relationship between green financial markets and African stocks becomes an important issue. Therefore, this paper examines the role of infectious disease-based uncertainty on the dynamic spillovers between African stock markets and clean energy stocks.

The authors employ the dynamic spillover in time and frequency domains and the nonparametric causality-in-quantiles approach over the period of November 30, 2010, to August 18, 2021.

These findings are discernible in this study's analysis. First, the authors find evidence of strong connectedness between the African stock markets and the clean energy market, and long-lived but weak in the short and medium investment horizons. Second, the BDS test shows that nonlinearity is crucial when examining the role of infectious disease-based equity market volatility in affecting the interactions between clean energy stocks and African stock markets. Third, the causal analysis provides evidence in support of a nonlinear causal relationship between uncertainties due to infectious diseases and the connection between both markets, mostly at lower and median quantiles.

Considering the global and recent use of clean energy equities and the stock markets for hedging and speculative purposes, one may argue that rising uncertainties may significantly influence risk transmissions across these markets. This study, therefore, is the first to examine the role of pandemic uncertainty on the connection between clean stocks and the African stock markets.

This study assesses the impact of environmental, social and governance (ESG) certification on capital structure decisions considering the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study utilizes the annual Asset-4 and Datastream data of Thomson Reuters Eikon for non-financial firms in member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Firm-fixed effects are used to avoid unobserved heterogeneity.

Firms with higher corporate sustainability have a higher leverage ratio. The positive impact of ESG scores on book leverage became more significant during the COVID-19 pandemic. These findings imply that ESG activities might serve as a signalling tool, especially considering the pandemic: ESG activities mitigate financial constraints when they are most pronounced and impactful.

Firms should invest in ESG activities to alleviate financial constraints. Researchers and practitioners are encouraged to explore how ESG and macro-specific factors jointly affect debt financing. Policymakers should incentivize ESG investment to reduce agency conflicts. Regulators in OIC countries should support firms that are encountering obstacles in obtaining ESG certification.

To date, the role of ESG investing in capital structure policy by considering the recent pandemic has not been assessed in OIC countries.

This study aims to explore key questions within the context of Asian countries: How do artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain adoption in accounting influence enterprise risk management and environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance? What role does enterprise risk management have as a mediator in this relationship? In addition, how does environmental uncertainty shape the interplay between AI and blockchain adoption in accounting, enterprise risk management and ESG performance?

The authors collected data from Thomson Reuters Eikon Datastream, initially targeting the 20 Asian countries with the highest gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Using stringent selection criteria, the research sample included 22,212 firms from these countries: Bahrain, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam. After a rigorous screening process, the final sample comprised 1,742 firms, representing 17,420 firm-year observations over the 2014–2023 period. This paper applied maximum likelihood structural equation modeling to analyze the data.

The findings reveal that both AI and blockchain adoption in accounting, along with enterprise risk management, positively impact ESG performance in the Asian context. Enterprise risk management serves as a mediating factor between AI and blockchain adoption in accounting and ESG performance. In addition, environmental uncertainty significantly moderates the relationships between AI and blockchain adoption in accounting and enterprise risk management, as well as between enterprise risk management and ESG performance.

This study uncovers the interplay between internal factors – such as AI and blockchain adoption in accounting and enterprise risk management – and external factors, notably environmental uncertainty, in fostering sustainable value for Asian firms. Internal factors enable firms to integrate ESG considerations into their operations, facilitating risk mitigation and enhancing ESG performance. Meanwhile, heightened environmental uncertainty drives the adoption of sustainable practices. Consequently, Asian Governments should prioritize the development of regions characterized by high environmental uncertainty to advance national sustainable development goals and encourage responsible business practices.

This study contributes to the existing literature by uncovering the combined effects of internal and external factors on ESG performance, offering empirical evidence from Asian countries with high GDP per capita. Specifically, it underscores the efficacy of AI and blockchain adoption in accounting and enterprise risk management, as well as the moderating role of environmental uncertainty, within the Asian context.

This paper aims to examine whether firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance indicates higher quality internal controls. The authors argue that commitment to high ESG performance is indicative of a commitment to quality corporate governance and impactful ESG practices are presumed to be achieved when pursued within a system of strong internal controls.

The authors obtain financial and ESG-related information for firms on the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE)-350 for the years 2010–2018. Following prior literature, the authors use audit report lag as a measure of auditor effort. Controlling for various factors that proxy for audit clients’ inherent risk, the authors hypothesize that the remaining variance in audit report lag is related to audit clients’ control risk, and test whether ESG performance explains some of that remaining variance. To measure ESG performance, the authors use two variables to proxy firm’s ESG performance, an ESG disclosure score and being listed on the FTSE4GOOD index. Thomson Reuters provides a weighted average and industry adjusted ESG disclosure score. The FTSE4Good listing status was manually collected. Random-effect GLS panel regression model is used to estimate relationships. The authors reran their regressions using the generalized linear model and the two-stage least square model and the authors used an industry adjusted audit report lag and the lagged value of ESG and FTSE4GOOD to ensure the robustness of the results.

Regressing audit report lag on different measures of ESG performance, the authors find that better ESG performance is associated with lower audit report lag. The results remain consistent when replacing ESG with FTSE4Good and applying alternative econometrical techniques. The authors also find that female board representation facilitates lower audit report lag.

This study provides an alternative methodological approach to indicate firms’ internal control quality. In addition, auditors can benefit from firms’ ESG performance/disclosure to assess their client’s governance, internal control quality and project that on the audit risk and the level of effort required.

Companies are increasingly appointing a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) to anchor the need to highlight climate change at the senior management level. This study aims to examine how CSO power and sustainability-based compensation influence climate reporting and carbon performance.

Using one of the largest data sets to date, consisting of 18,834 company years through the author’s observations, spanning an 11-year period (2011–2021) in 33 countries. This paper used quantitative methods – specifically, ordinal logistic regression estimation. This paper measures the level of climate change disclosure based on the carbon disclosure leadership methodology. Carbon performance is based on the intensity of carbon emissions (Scope 1, Scope 2), which is a quantitative and relatively more objective measure.

The results suggest that climate change disclosure continued to increase and the carbon emissions intensity of the companies in this study gradually decreased over the sample period. This paper finds that the presence of the CSO within the top management team has a positive and significant influence on the level of information on climate change of the companies in the sample. This finding confirms the idea that the managerial capacity of CSOs motivates the disclosure of climate change. The empirical results confirm that there are differences in the role that the CSO and sustainability-based compensation play in influencing the quality of climate information disclosure in developed and developing countries.

The recourse on a mixed theoretical framework, which highlights upper echelons theory, argues the understanding of the role of CSOs in explaining the relationship between climate change disclosure–carbon performance relationship. The novelty of the study lies in the approaches adopted to describe the quality of climate change disclosure. To control for endogeneity, this paper uses a difference-in-difference analysis by adding a firm to the Morgan Stanley Capital International index as an exogenous shock.

This study aims to examine the relationship between sustainable activities and financial performance under the moderation of the Shariah supervisory board (SSB) of Islamic banks (IBs).

The sample consists of IBs in Asia from 2015 to 2018. Sustainable activities were collected from sustainability and annual reports, while additional data were sourced from Orbis, Thomson Reuters, and Euromonitor. Weighted content analysis measures sustainable activities, and general least square regression was used to test the hypothesis.

Sustainable activities are positively correlated to IBs’ financial performance in the current and following year. However, the SSB cannot strengthen this relationship.

IBs should integrate sustainable financing or green banking into their strategies and operations, as shareholders are increasingly drawn to investing in banks that demonstrate strong social and environmental responsibility.

First, policymakers can improve guidelines related to sustainability in IBs in line with Islamic concepts and perspectives. Second, regulation can optimize the role of SSB in terms of sustainability based on maqasid shariah.

This study examines sustainable activities per the concept of maqasid shariah. Financial performance testing is carried out not only in the current period but also in one subsequent year. Limited research exists in this area, especially with a large sample in the Asian region.

This paper aims to assess whether environmental (carbon) damage costs affect firm value and ownership.

This paper uses fixed-effects panel models and difference-in-differences design to tease out essential effects based on 69,352 sampled firm-year observations from 2004 to 2022. It uses Trucost data on the dollar cost of environmental damage at the firm level.

Using proprietary environmental damage costs data on US firms from Trucost, this paper finds that firm value is negatively associated with environmental (carbon) damage costs, with additional tests suggesting that the association is causal. Institutional investors increase their relative holdings following environmental shocks that reveal financial benefits to internalizing or reducing these costs.

Knowing the significance of the cost of environmental damage at the firm level is important for corporate managers, regulators and investors’ decision-making. However, this has yet to be researched. This paper contributes to the understanding of financial economics.