Abstract/Summary

This thesis introduces four essays dedicated to the topics of responsible investment and reputation management. The first essay studies reputation management. This intangible asset is a strategic cornerstone for the company’s success, however academics yet to provide firm evidence if the management practices bring desirable outcome. Another unresolved question is a power of reputation over time. This paper addresses these questions through exploring the connection between firms’ concerns over reputation and performance, estimated according to Fortune’s “America’s Most Admired Companies” (AMAC) rating. The findings of the study demonstrate a relationship between firms’ concern over reputation management and performance in the rating system. Which provides evidence of reputation management to generate positive outcome for the company. The results also suggest that the power of positive reputation has a “lasting weekend”, measured over period of time, proving its enduring effect. The second essay focuses survival on ethical and conventional funds. It implements a survival analysis to explore if ethical funds represent stronger survival capabilities. . The study implements ex ante method to generate dataset, which allows to study the survival, based on the dataset developed in the analysis of Kreander et al. (2005). The attained results indicate stronger survival capabilities of ethical funds. The third essay evaluated value generation capabilities of sell-side brokers through the introduction of the ESG ranking. Implementation of new MiFID II regulations interferes with the financial landscape and directly impact on brokers’ business models and severely increase competition as brokerage firms are forced to disclose the fee information. The current study focuses on ESG ranking development as an alternative product a sell-side broker could offer to the client alongside the other research services. A portfolio of stocks was created on the basis of the ESG recommendations to evaluate value generation capability and its efficiency. Further, ESG rating based portfolio was created using the ASSET4 data. The portfolios were compared to the portfolios of SRI funds and European sustainable index. This approach allows comparing the competitiveness of developed ranking. Empirical analysis embedded CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model) and Fama–French (1993) models. The analysis revealed statistically strong results. Then recommendation and SRI-based portfolios demonstrated negative alpha. Ranking-based portfolio demonstrated positive and negative significant alpha. This evidence suggest the ESG recommendations introduced by sell-side broker could withhold competition with similar products, however do not allow to generate consistent abnormal returns. The last essay explores the ESG framework in the context of the private equity sector. This topic has been significantly overlooked by the academic community due to the limited information available for in-depth empirical studies, as well as the only relatively recent interest from the perspective of investors, in comparison to the equity markets. This essay extends the existent research scale and explores the motivation, the issues and the barriers related to ESG framework in the private equity field. It provides evidence of a growing demand from institutional investors for the ESG however the existent scepticism and opaqueness of the industry hinders the growth of framework. This essay introduced an exploratory study of the relationship between negative ESG events and private equity multiples. The results proved the impact the events have, as companies involved in negative ESG events demonstrated weaker growth on the basis of multiple evaluations. This study introduces a firm base to further grow empirical insight to the potential benefits private equity sector could extract in association with ESG implementation to their investment.