Background: Light has been shed on the textile industry as one of the leading industries when it comes to economic growth, global warming and sustainable development. The increasing demand for sustainable activities from stakeholders has led to the importance of measuring the sustainable development of companies. ESG reporting is a common tool used to indicate a company’s sustainability performance. Prior research has tended to focus on cross-sectional industries, and therefore a gap was identified for industry specific research.   Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explain the relationship between sustainability performance and financial performance in the textile industry in the European and North American markets to see if companies that invest in sustainability activities benefit financially.   Method: This research has followed a positivistic paradigm, with deductive reasoning and a quantitative approach. A probability sampling approach was performed by conducting secondary data from Thomson Reuters DataStream of companies in the textile industry in Europe and North America. This resulted in a final sample of ESG scores and ROIC of 44 companies. The data was later analysed in the SPSS software program by following the estimation method Ordinary Least Squares (OLS).    Findings: The literature review developed two hypotheses to address the research purpose and questions. The two hypotheses were analysed through two regression analyses that were satisfied through the OLS estimation method. The result showed that there was a significant relationship between the aggregated ESG score and ROIC which supported the first hypothesis. The second hypothesis of the multiple regression model showed that each component of ESG is correlated to ROIC, however, the environmental factor was not statistically significantly related.    Conclusion: The thesis showed that there is a positive relationship between ESG performance and ROIC in this study. This implies that companies that invest in sustainable development increase their financial performance. The aggregated ESG score as well as the social factor and the governance factor had the highest impact on ROIC, which is supported by the stakeholder theory as there has been an increasing demand on social and governance activities in the textile industry. This further supports that sustainability performance impact on financial performance is industry specific.

This study examines whether the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Financial Performance (FP) is dependent on industry belonging. Our accounting-based measurement of FP (Return On Assets) displayed an overall negative correlation with ESG scores, while our market based measurement of FP (Tobin Q) displayed an overall insignificant relationship. We separated the studied firms into the industries Basic Materials, Consumer Cyclicals, Consumer non-Cyclicals, Energy, Financials, Healthcare, Industrials, Real estate, Technology, and Utilities. When separating the studied firms into their respective industries we found that both our accounting-based and market-based measurements of FP was significantly correlated with CSR in 7/10 industries and 3/10 industries respectively. The industries different CSR and FP relationships suggests that firms in different industries have different implications of their CSR practices, and that more extensive industry considerations are necessary to further understand the relationship between CSR and FP.

Embedding social and financial goals into investment decisions and organizational missions is an increasing hallmark of social finance, a rapidly growing phenomenon that aims to create sustainable solutions to some of society’s largest challenges such as poverty alleviation (Mosley & Hulme, 1998; Burgess & Pande, 2005; Beck et al. 2007a), wealth inequality (Buera et al. 2014; Lagoarde-Segot, 2017) and environmental preservation (Nicholls & Pharoah, 2008) among others (Benedikter, 2011). In recent years, the concept of social finance has emerged through applications such as venture philanthropy (Moody, 2008; Scarlata & Alemany, 2010), socially responsible investing (Renneboog et al. 2008; Nofsinger & Varma, 2014; Gutiérrez-Nieto et al. 2016), impact investing (Bugg-Levine & Emerson, 2011; Höchstädter & Scheck, 2015), corporate social responsibility (Falck & Heblich, 2007; Jha & Cox, 2015), crowdfunding sites that appeal to the charitable intentions of retail investors (Lehner, 2013; Lehner & Nicholls, 2014) and microfinance (Morduch, 1999; Beck et al. 2007b; Armendáriz & Labie, 2011). The microfinance industry is particularly suited to explore the nuances of social finance due to the wide range of actors present in the sector, including not only public, private and nonprofit actors (D’Espallier et al. 2016) but also a wide range of investor profiles including commercial rate, concessionary and fully donative funders (Dorfleitner et al, 2017). To meet these innovations in social finance, a substantial body of scholarly research has materialized in various areas: corporate finance (Bogan, 2012; Tchuigoua, 2014), investing (Dorfleitner et al. 2012; Brière & Szafarz, 2015), nonprofit finance (Jegers, 2011; Roberts, 2013), banking (Gutiérrez-Nieto et al. 2009; Cornée et al. 2016), entrepreneurship (Nicholls, 2010; Bruton et al. 2015), development economics (Cull et al. 2009; Ahlin et al. 2011; Hermes et al. 2011; Hartarska et al. 2013), business ethics (Sandberg et al. 2009; Arjaliès, 2010; Hudon & Sandberg, 2013), organizational theory (Battilana & Dorado, 2012; Pache & Santos, 2013), legal studies (Henderson & Malani, 2009), public economics (Duncan, 2004; Andreoni & Payne, 2011) and management studies (Cobb et al. 2016). However, these theories are often siloed within a particular domain and used separately. Despite a long research tradition on microfinance, there is still an ongoing debate on how to assess profits in a heterogeneous environment with multiple organizational objectives, the comparative advantages of public and private funders and their associated financial instruments to scale the microfinance sector and the nature of trade-offs between the financial and social objectives of microfinance institutions (MFIs). This dissertation aims to fill these gaps by analyzing social finance from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aim is to further nuance our understanding of the compatibility between financial and social objectives and how the trade-off between these two elements is moderated through financial mechanisms from donors and social investors. By analyzing the dimensions where trade-offs are most acute for social enterprises, this dissertation aims to put forth a conceptual framework to help assess profitability. Our analysis focuses on the microfinance industry, which offers a rich research setting due the wide range of institutional profiles active in the sector, including nonprofit, cooperative, for-profit and government agents and its global contributions to financial inclusion, poverty reduction and female empowerment. This dissertation is structured into three chapters, each of which addresses a different research question using different methods and units of analysis. The first chapter is a meta-analysis that uses statistical analysis of empirical research results to aggregate the existing findings on social and financial performance trade-offs as they pertain to microfinance institutions. The second chapter develops a typology of subsidy and donation instruments and then proposes a conceptual model to identify the crowding-in and crowding-out effects of public and private donors on private, commercial investors. The second chapter is complemented with an empirical analysis of a Mexican MFI, Banco Compartamos, using secondary data to suggest how the evolution of funding instruments attracted private commercial capital. Chapter three constructs a conceptual framework to identify fair profits for social enterprise, focusing on the case of microfinance. We then empirically apply the conceptual framework to an international dataset of microfinance institutions. Starting from the observation that no consensus has emerged regarding performance trade-offs between the financial and social objectives of microfinance institutions, Chapter 1 – A Meta-analysis Examining the Nature of Trade-offs in Microfinance – aggregates existing research findings to determine the dimensions of MFI performance, and study characteristics, that drive the confirmation of trade-offs. Specifically, after an initial screen of 3,299 articles, 623 empirical trade-off findings from 61 studies were coded into a dataset, where each empirical finding consists of a pairwise observation between a single financial performance variable and a single social performance variable. Using a probit model to analyze the direction and statistical significance across categories of social/financial performance and study artifacts, findings suggest that depth of outreach, cost of outreach, and efficiency indicators increase the prevalence of trade-offs, while risk indicators are associated with fewer trade-offs. Profitability indicators and outreach to women are found to have no significant effect on performance trade-offs. Study characteristics suggest that using an economic frontier methodology or publishing in development journals increases the incidence of trade-offs. These results help to understand the moderating factors that drive performance trade-offs and suggest that MFI managers and stakeholders may need to make difficult decisions regarding the social goals that may need to be sacrificed to achieve financial sustainability.Chapter 2 – Crowding-in without Crowding-out: Subsidy Design to Foster Commercialization – investigates the financial mechanisms that public and private donors have at their disposal and how they can use these instruments to attract fully commercial private capital to social enterprises. In this article, we first construct a typology to explain the ways in which private donors are complementing public donors in subsidy design. We argue that specific instruments such as corporate intangibles and credit guarantees can trigger permanent crowding-in effects that attract commercial partners, while preventing perverse effects such as crowding-out and soft budget constraints. Applying the typology and investment logics to the case of Compartamos, we observe that crowding-in and crowding-out effects can be present simultaneously, which allows us to suggest that subsidies and donations do not force path dependency towards commercialization but rather co-exist, for example attracting commercial debt investment while crowding-out commercial equity. Our research could help both private and public donors identify strategies to maximize social impact while reducing perverse mutual externalities. Finally, in the presence of performance trade-offs and donor pressures to commercialize operations and scale-up, Chapter 3 – What is an acceptable level of profit for a social enterprise? Insights from Microfinance – develops a conceptual framework for fair profits in social enterprise and then applies the framework to the microfinance industry. The fair profit framework is constructed on four dimensions: the level of profitability, the extent to which the organization adheres to its social mission, the pricing and the surplus distribution of the organization. Using a global sample of MFIs, our results suggest that satisfying all four dimensions is a difficult, although not impossible task as less than 3% of the sample fulfill all four criteria. Using our framework, we suggest that excessive profits in microfinance can be better understood relative to pricing, the social outreach of an organization, and the commitment to clients over time through reduced interest rates. This dissertation provides solid scientific evidence on the compatibility between financial and social returns in social finance. Our dissertation examines social finance through the lens of microfinance, and investigates the performance trade-offs facing MFIs as well as the moderating role of financing mechanisms to help MFIs fulfill their double-bottom-line mandate. We hope we demonstrate that the unique combination of financing technicalities significantly shape the evolution of recipient organizations. Some practical implications are also identified to help practitioners, regulators and managers navigate the ongoing debate on the compatibility of financial and social returns and the design of financial instruments for social enterprise. We firmly believe that these academic works contribute and bring new perspectives to social finance in development economics, and business ethics. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Thesis (MBA.) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / This research examines the effect of human capital investment on the firm’s performance in South African companies. This research is important given that the human asset has been proven to be one of the most important assets in the organisation and therefore this research set out to examine whether human assets actually contribute to the performance of the firm in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange Social Responsible index (SRI). Therefore the objective of this research was to examine the relationship between human capital investment and firm performance in terms of sales turnover, share price and net profit. Secondary data on human capital investment and companies’ performance (sales turnover, net profit and share price) were collected from integrated report archives of the 28 best performing companies in the JSE SRI Index for the six years from 2010 to 2015. The theoretical foundation was on the human capital theory and related previous literature. The research adopted a quantitative paradigm and applied the regression statistics, which were analysed with the aid of the excel software. Findings from the regression analysis indicate p value of 0.04 for HCI and sales turnover, p value of 0.69 for HCI and the share price and p value of 0.16 for HCI and net profit. This therefore, means that, within the sample of companies, there is a significant relationship between human capital investment and sales turnover of firms and no significant relationship between human capital investment and share price, and net profit of companies. This finding indicates that the result may change from negative to positive with a longer period of data. Over the long term companies that invest in HC would experience profitability (within a range of 10 to 13 years) (Blundell et al, 1999).This means that future research should use a longer period of data and include more companies outside of the JSE SRI Index companies. The research recommends that there is a need for companies to invest in human capital to improve companies’ performance and to win customers’ confidence.

Over 390,000 businesses failed in the United States in 2014. The primary cause for most business failures is poor planning, and budgets are a primary means of planning. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine to what extent, if any, budget planning, budget control, and the age of the business significantly predict financial performance in small businesses. The target population consisted of small business leaders in the Midwest. Churchill and Lewis's theory on the relative importance of selected management factors of small businesses through 5 stages of development formed the theoretical framework for this study. Data were collected through a self-developed online survey using existing Likert-scale measures for each variable based on prior research about those variables. A convenience sample of 86 Midwest U.S. small business leaders identified through SurveyMonkey's crowdsourcing pool resulted in 77 participants with useable responses. Standard multiple linear regression determined the extent to which budget planning, budget control, and age of the business predicted the value of financial performance. The model as a whole was able to significantly predict financial performance. The linear combination of predictor variables (budget planning, budget control, and business age) accounted for approximately 12% of the variation in financial performance. Budget planning significantly predicted financial performance, even when budget control and business age were held constant. Better planning using budgets may help leaders improve the financial health of their small businesses, potentially reducing business failures and job losses. Financially strong and healthy small businesses can create jobs and improve the economic health of local communities.

Corporate governance can play a significant role in financial market stability and economic development. Corporate governance scholars have provided controversial results with respect to the relationships between corporate governance and both corporate financial performance and market value. Based on agency theory and institutional theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to investigate the relationship between corporate governance mechanisms, financial performance, and market value in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's 116 firms from 2010 to 2014. Financial performance was measured by return on assets and return on equity, while market value was measured by Tobin's q. Corporate governance mechanisms involved in this study were board size, board independence, board committees, ownership structure, and executive compensation. The financial statements and corporate governance mechanisms collected from the websites of sampled firms and the Saudi stock market (Tadawul). The findings of multiple regression tests revealed a statistically significant relationship between corporate governance mechanisms and both corporate financial performance and market value. This study may contribute to social change by building confidence in the Saudi capital market and improving the lives of stakeholders and community in general. The results may help business leaders understand the influence of corporate governance on their firms' success and the country's growth. Academic researchers, investors, regulatory bodies, practitioners, and experts in the area of corporate governance may benefit as well.

Approximately $25.2 trillion in total assets under management in the United States is involved in some strategy of socially responsible and sustainable investing. Grounded in the stakeholder theory, the purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationships between financial performance, firm size, leverage, and corporate social responsibility. A random sample included 119 large companies located in the United States from the population of companies listed in the Russell 100 index. The data were collected via Bloomberg Terminal. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to predict Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activity scores. The 3 predictor variables accounted for approximately 7% of the variance in ESG activity scores and the result was statistically significant, F(3,115) = 2.83, p < .04, R2 = .07. Although the p value was significant, the R2 was low representing a poor model fit. In the final analysis, total revenue was added to the model and was a significant predictor and negatively correlated with ESG activity scores; However, return on equity and leverage were not significant predictors of ESG activity scores suggesting the potential need to transfer some corporate social initiatives from business leaders to government policy makers. Future researchers should consider incorporating additional variables to make the model more useful. The implications for positive social change include the potential to identify fiscal incentives for corporate social programs by policy makers which benefit stakeholders such as employees, suppliers, customers, communities, and the environment.

Titel: Finns det något samband mellan ESG-score och finansiell prestation för företag  inom finansmarknaden i Europa? En kvantitativ studie på 52 banker i Europa. Nivå: Examensarbete på grundnivå (kandidatexamen) i ämnet företagsekonomi Författare: Hakki Arhan Altunsayar och Ensar BujupiHandledare: Jan Svanberg  Datum: 2023 – majSyftet: Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka hur ESG-score påverkar den finansiella  prestationen för företag inom finansmarknaden i Europa.  Metod: Denna studie har en positivistiskt forskningsfilosofi med en hypotetiskt- deduktiv ansats. Studien innefattar en kvantitativ strategi som har genomförts med data från 52 banker inom finansmarknaden i Europa för året 2021. Studiens data är hämtad från databasen Refinitiv Eikon. Datan har sedan analyserats i statistikprogrammen SPSS och Minitab.  Resultat och slutsats: Studiens resultat visar att det förekommer ett svagt icke signifikant negativt samband mellan ESG-betyg och finansiell prestation i banker som är lokaliserade och verksamma inom Europa.  Examensarbetets bidrag: Studien bidrar till att fylla ett forskningsgap där vi tar reda på om det råder ett samband mellan ESG-betyg och finansiell prestation inom finansmarknaden i Europa, då tar vi specifikt hänsyn till bankerna inom marknaden, studien bidrar till forskningsområdet företagsekonomi med inriktning redovisning.  Förslag till fortsatt forskning: Det krävs ytterligare forskning med andra typer av analyser och fler variabler. Detta för att kunna dra en mer omfattande slutsats om det förekommer samband mellan ESG-score och finansiella prestationer på finansmarknaden i Europa.  Nyckelord: CSR, Legitimitetsteorin, ESG, Intressentteorin, finansiella prestationer. / Title: Is there a relationship between ESG scores and financial performance of financial  market companies in Europe? A quantitative study of 52 banks in Europe Level: Final assignment for Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration  Author: Ensar Bujupi &amp; Hakki Arhan Altunsayar  Supervisor: Jan Svanberg  Date: 2023 - May  Aim: The purpose of this study is to investigate how the ESG-score affects the financial performance of companies within the financial market in Europe.  Method: This study has a positivistic research philosophy with a hypothetical- deductive approach. The study includes quantitative strategy that has been carried out with data from 52 banks in the financial market for the year 2021. The data for the study has been taken from Refinitiv Eikon database. The data has then been analyzed in statistical programs such as SPSS and Minitab.  Results and conclusions: The results of the study show that there is a weak non- significant negative relationship between ESG ratings and financial performance in banks located and operating within Europe.  Contribution of the thesis: The study contributes to filling a research gap where we find out if there is a relationship between ESG ratings and financial performance within the financial market in Europe, then we specifically take into account the banks within the market, the study contributes to the research area of business finance with a focus on accounting.  Suggestions for future research: Further research is required with other types of analyzes and more variables. This is to be able to draw a more comprehensive conclusion if there is a connection between the ESG score and financial performance on the financial market in Europe.  Key words: CSR, Legitimacy theory, ESG, Stakeholder theory, financial performance.

This thesis aims to examine what impact the Covid-19 pandemic has on the pay-performance relationship. This study performs an OLS regression analysis of total CEO compensation on accounting and market-based firm performance for 2017-2020 using 233 Swedish listed firms. The results could not find a positive relationship between total CEO compensation and firm performance during 2017-2020. The findings rather indicate that Swedish CEOs are rewarded for failure. Moreover, the results could not find support for a weaker pay-performance sensitivity. These results contribute to the existing research by giving insights into the effects of financial distress on the pay-performance relationship in Sweden.

Sustainability work has garnered increasing attention in society and among stakeholders. A key concept within sustainability is ESG, which encompasses environmental, social work, and corporate governance. The ESG concept builds upon CSR, which focuses on companies' societal responsibilities. Due to inconsistent findings in previous research, there is a growing interest in exploring the impact of sustainability work on companies' financial performance. Thus, this study aims to examine the relationship between sustainability work (ESG) and financial performance within the banking sector of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland. To achieve this goal, correlations between ESG ratings and ROA, as well as ROE, were analyzed for 148 companies in the aforementioned countries. The data was obtained from the Refinitiv Eikon database and analyzed using the statistical software IBM SPSS. The results indicated a positive association between sustainability work (ESG) and financial performance, with corporate governance having a greater influence on financial performance compared to social and environmental factors. Further research suggestions include conducting similar studies in other countries and industries, as results may differ. Additionally, exploring alternative databases apart from Refinitiv Eikon could be beneficial to assess if different results are obtained.