Risco de ações de empresas com boas práticas ESG

Abstract

The ESG topic has gained a lot of repercussion in recent years. This acronym summarizes a set of practices focused on the environment, society and corporate governance, where many companies have adopted the initiative to publicize their actions that are consistent with this new reality. Given this context, the general objective of this study was to compare the risk of Brazilian public companies with and without ESG practices, watching the risk in the presence and absence of such practices. Data was collected on the disclosure of ESG practices on the Refinitiv Eikon platform, separating companies that had some reported ESG practices from other firms. Data on the beta coefficient, representing the variation in companies' share prices, were collected from the Economatica database. The study sample included all Brazilian public companies with data available in both bases in the period between 2019 and 2023, totaling 1,402 observations. According to the results, it was observed that companies that practice and disclose some ESG practices have, on average, greater risk than other companies. These results went against the theory and hypothesis of this study, since no lower risks were found for firms practicing ESG. In this way, this study contributes to the advancement of research that seeks to relate business performance with ESG practices. From a more direct approach to ESG, with a focus on the Brazilian market, new evidence was obtained to encourage debates and discussions on the subject.