Browsing by Subject "Sustainable development"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Scores and Firm Profitability Across Countries and Sectors: An Empirical Analysis
    (2021) Thissen, Emily; Jilani, Saleha
    This paper explores the relationship between a firm's Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) score, and its profitability across sectors and countries. More specifically, this work aims to understand if European and Asian firms see a greater or lesser effect of ESG Score on profits relative to firms in the United States. This work also explores whether certain componentsof the ESG scores (environmental, social, or governance) have a more significant impact on profitability inspecific sectors. Using ESG score and firm financial data from Thomson Reuter's Eikon and control variables for firm size, risk, and industry, a three-part analysis was run. An initial analysis of the ESG combined score and the individual pillar scores and gross profit relationship is conducted using OLS regression and time and firm fixed effects regression analysis. Next, to understand how geographic region plays a role in the correlation between firm ESG score and financial performance, OLS regressions are run using regional dummy variables and interaction terms between regional dummy variables and ESG score. Lastly, this thesis explores how the ESG score-gross profit relationship varies across industries using interaction terms between the industry dummy variable for each industry with the ESG score variable. The results suggest a positive relationship between ESG score and gross profit, with varying effects for different pillars. The most significant effect was on the environmental pillar. The results also show that European firms see a greater correlation between financial performance and higher ESG scores than United States firms. The analysis of Asian firms did not show a more significant relationship between financial performance and higher ESG scores compared to the United States. Across sectors, results varied. This suggests a clear direction for future research in understanding the relationship between more disaggregated industrial categories and different components of the ESG score. This thesis offers new insights into regional and cross-sector differences in the effect of both combined ESG score and the individual ESG pillar scores.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    ESG Investing in Uncertainty: Analyzing the Returns of ESG Within Various States of Investor Sentiment
    (2021) Turkson, Jesse; Binder, Carola Conces
    This paper examines the relationship between corporate responsibility and stock performance through various levels of fear in the market. I utilize Environmental, Social, and Governance scores (provided by Thomson Reuters Eikon) for measures of corporate responsibility, and the Volatility Index, or VIX (created by the Chicago Board Options Exchange), to quantify levels of fear. Stock performance is measured weekly, with companies from the S&P 500 as my representative sample. Results focus on ESG Total scores and the individual pillar breakdowns for each ESG component. My findings demonstrate that in the presence of considerably higher levels of fear, increases in ESG scores yield positive returns. On the other hand, lower levels of fear resulted in negative returns. My results suggest that there is an association between ESG and stock returns, with the direction being dependent on the level of investor fear in the market.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Breaking Point: Land use and Sustainability in the Mayan City of Caracol.
    (2019) Frye, Joshua; Šešelj, Maja
    Right now, there are more people living in cities than outside of them. At the same time, the sustainability of our cities continues to become less and less certain. Low-density urban settlements have been held up by some as a model for how we could redesign and reimagine our current cities to solve the greatest challenges of the modern urban environment. The problem with using the low-density model is the ‘collapse’ that appears to have occured in the greatest examples of theses cities, most obviously the Classic Maya, and Greater Angkor. This Thesis aims to provide insight into how the agricultural component of Mayan low-density may have been a vital component that led to the ‘collapse’ of the Classic Maya. This project argues that the rigidity of agrarian systems in the Mayan City of Caracol led to an overtaxing of the land as population levels reached their peak exhausting the soil throughout the entirety of the urban polity. At the same time, changes in the trading systems of the region and the onset of a drought that strained the entire region. The factors came together to fracture the bonds of political power, and force individuals to leave the cities altogether.ing to resist oppressive systems of the academy and the community. With this focus on effecting change, performance ethnographers vastly expand the reach of ethnographic projects. As a consequence, these projects may fall short of the anthropologist’s high expectations for transformative work, and run the risk of reinforcing the researcher’s power over their subjects by prioritizing their own agenda. This thesis examines methodological interventions performance offers to ethnography using a few case studies, and argues that performance ethnography is not successful when it is used mainly to transform or liberate the subjects of research. For these interventions to be effective, anthropologists should recognize their limitations and use performance ethnography as an investigative and educational tool.