Son Sungjin, Kim Jootae
College of Business and Economics, Dankook University, Yong-in, South Korea.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 12;13:893535. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.893535. eCollection 2022.
This study attempts to examine the relationship between environment, social, and governance (ESG) management and financial performance and the role of socially responsible investment in the National Pension Fund (NPF), Korea's largest institutional investor. This study tries to provide evidence for the slack resource hypothesis by verifying whether companies with higher financial performance make more efforts to improve ESG performance. In addition, we tried to validate whether NPF is expanding its investments in corporations with high economic performance and high ESG performance. Based on our analysis, Korean companies with good financial performance actively participate in ESG. When we compared the performance between 2019 and 2020, companies with high ESG performance increased regardless of financial performance level, whereas companies with high financial performance and low ESG performance decreased. This represents that the perception and attitude of Korean companies toward ESG management are evolving. NPF has a high investment ratio for firms having a high ratio in both financial and ESG performance. NPF further invested in companies with high ESG performance, even if the financial performance is not decent. This study provides evidence that Korean companies' interest in ESG management as well as the behavior of socially responsible investment of NPF are rising.
本研究试图考察环境、社会和治理（ESG）管理与财务绩效之间的关系，以及社会责任投资在韩国最大的机构投资者——国民年金公团（NPF）中所起的作用。本研究试图通过验证财务绩效较高的公司是否会做出更多努力来改善ESG绩效，为闲置资源假说提供证据。此外，我们试图验证NPF是否正在扩大对经济绩效高且ESG绩效高的公司的投资。基于我们的分析，财务绩效良好的韩国公司积极参与ESG。当我们比较2019年和2020年的绩效时，无论财务绩效水平如何，ESG绩效高的公司数量都有所增加，而财务绩效高但ESG绩效低的公司数量则有所减少。这表明韩国公司对ESG管理的认知和态度正在发生变化。NPF对财务和ESG绩效比率都高的公司具有较高的投资比率。即使财务绩效不佳，NPF也会进一步投资于ESG绩效高的公司。本研究提供了证据，证明韩国公司对ESG管理的兴趣以及NPF的社会责任投资行为正在上升。
