CEF.UP – FIN Seminar/Webinar

Thursday – October 12^th, 2023 at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

Title – The World’s Most Ethical Companies financial performance

Nelson Areal  – Universidade do Minho

“The financial consequences of embracing ethical conduct in business remain a point of contention in the literature. We discuss why ethical companies can have advantages over others by exploring three concurrent dimensions: organizational values, stakeholder management, and good reputation. We evaluate the long-term financial performance of the World’s Most Ethical Companies, a list devised by Ethisphere, using a calendar time portfolio returns. We compare the performance of these companies to a matching sample and, following Mitton (2022), perform a large study to examine the impact of methodological choices when constructing the matching sample on the results. We show that these choices can have a significant impact on results. Overall, the portfolio of these companies overperform the market, but their performance is not different from matched samples.”