기업의 여유자원과 ESG 성과에 대한 연구: 유상증자를 중심으로

This paper examines environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance around seasoned equity offerings (SEOs). A firm may improve ESG performance prior to SEOs to the extent that it believes that investors will be more favorable to firms with better ESG performance (window-dressing hypothesis). In contrast, SEO may indicate that a firm is short of internal resources and a firm under little financial slack may sacrifice ESG performance (Slack resource hypothesis). Through empirical analyses, we find support for the latter: ESG performance of firms decrease significantly around SEOs, while capital expenditures and R&D do not decrease. However, financially constrained firms do not reduce ESG performance, suggesting that these firms care about investors' perception of them. The results overall are consistent with the proposition that unconstrained firms with little financial slack sacrifice ESG performance but constrained firms cannot as doing so will further aggravate financial constraints. As such, both financial slack and financial constraints are important determinants of ESG performance.