Os efeitos da performance sustentável sobre a performance financeira corporativa: uma abordagem de modelagem de equações estruturais

Abstract

One of the often-cited definitions for sustainable development claims that for sustainable development to take place, the current generation must be able to supply its own needs without compromising the capacity of the future generations to supply their own. The most recent empirical studies sought to analyze the effects of sustainable business practices to determine whether there is a relationship between such practices and economic performance and the extent of the influence they have on one another. This thesis aims to determine what indicators for social, environmental and economic performance impact on corporate financial performance. To this end, a literature review was conducted in order to determine the gaps that the literature had left unexplored. The gaps found were related to variable usage and methods employed. The competing models strategy was employed in order to determine the effects of the proxies for sustainability performance over financial performance, employing data from 179 organizations that reported their sustainable information using the GRI standards reporting model, until the end of 2018. Both models found a relationship between environmental performance and financial performance. The construct portraying environmental performance was found to be substantially related to financial performance (R² values >0,80, as well as significant at a 0,05 level). The other relationship that was found regarded the Social Performance construct as weakly related to the accounting performance construct (R²<0,25, also significant at a 0,05 level). The disclosure items of Sox and Nox emissions were considered as components of the environmental performance construct, while Tobin’s Q was chosen to represent financial performance. The second model found evidence of a relationship between social performance, portrayed by board diversity, and financial performance, portrayed by return on sales. While the models were successful in detecting the existing relationship among the variables, causality could not be inferred, since there is not enough empirical evidence to support this claim. While no causal relationship could be found among the variables here explored, the results indicate which aspects should be more carefully examined by researchers in future studies.