외국인비용과 ESG 성과: 법적 근원의 시각에서

ESG has emerged across countries in response to the institutional pressure demanding the corporate ethics. This study hypothesizes that multinational enterprises (MNEs) should reduce liability of foreignness, thus should engage in ESG more actively than the local firms. We also hypothesize heterogeneity among the MNEs’ ESG. Because civil law specifies punishment in the legal clauses, which regulates firms, the MNEs in the civil law countries will make more efforts in elaborating on ESG. The hypotheses are tested with a dataset of 36,629 firm-year observations composed of the 354 MNEs spreading 60 countries and their 6,124 counterpart local firms during 2010-2021 years. We use five statistical models including both random effects and fixed effects models and the statistical findings suggest MNEs’ ESG scores significantly higher than those of local firms, demonstrating presence of liability of foreignness and the MNE efforts to reduce it. In the environmental and social score, MNEs that entered the civil law countries show higher ESG scores than other groups, which means that the legal origin substantially affects local ESG strategy for MNEs.