Do firms' sustainability practices pay off during global crises? Evidence from Asia and the Pacific

This paper examines the relationship between firms' sustainability practices and their value during a crisis when overall trust and support are lacking in the economy. While a handful of studies explore this research agenda concentrating on the US context and a standalone crisis, we provide novel evidence on the Asia Pacific region considering three global crises. Applying difference-in-differences regressions, we find that high-sustainability companies posted superior value during the global financial crisis and the European debt crisis. This result, however, does not hold for the COVID-19 crisis. This key finding passes several endogeneity tests (firm-fixed effect, propensity score matching, and post-crisis interaction). As we explore potential mechanisms of firm resistance during crises and apply a triple difference approach, we find evidence that firm value was intensified during the crises due to sustainability activities coupled with high customer loyalty, high institutional ownership, and a low degree of information asymmetry. Finally, although high sustainability performance generally positively impacted firm value during crises, this relationship was negative (weaker) for the highly impacted industries (the emerging countries) included in the sample. Our key finding continues to hold for a set of robustness checks. The outcome of this study provides significant policy directions to regulators, corporate managers, and investment professionals.