Relação entre ESG (environmental, social and governance) com a estrutura de capital e desempenho econômico-financeiro em empresas de capital aberto da América Latina: uma análise multitéorica

Abstract

The growing global appeal for corporate social responsibility highlights the importance of ethical and sustainable business practices. ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is defined by practices that assess corporate operations based on three pillars: Environmental, Social, and Governance. Studies on this topic, largely concentrated in developed markets, present inconclusive results. In the Latin American context, firms face agency conflicts, and although empirical studies have examined the effects of ESG performance in the region, none has adopted a multitheoretical approach to investigate its relationship with capital structure and economic-financial performance. Accordingly, this study aimed to investigate the state of the art of the scientific literature on ESG in the corporate context and to empirically analyze how overall ESG performance and its individual pillars relate to capital structure, cost of capital, and economic-financial performance of publicly listed companies in Latin America. The study comprised three articles with the following objectives: (i) to conduct a bibliometric review of the evolution and current state of academic research on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) in the corporate context; (ii) to systematically assess how overall ESG performance and its pillars influence capital structure decisions and the cost of capital of publicly listed Latin American firms, supported by the Pecking Order and Trade-off theories; and (iii) to analyze the relationship between ESG performance and the economic-financial performance of publicly listed companies in Latin America, from the perspectives of Agency and Stakeholder theories. Refinitiv’s database was used to obtain ESG data and financial statement information. Data from six countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) were analyzed, as these countries presented a minimum amount of information considered relevant for the statistical analyses. In Article 2, multilevel panel data regression was employed, while Article 3 applied structural equation modeling. Article 1 identified an exponential growth in academic interest in ESG, especially over the past five years, highlighting the lack of standardization in ESG performance measurement and the concentration of studies in developed countries. These factors limit the comparability of results and reinforce the need for research in emerging markets. Article 2 showed that the environmental and social pillars are associated with reductions in the cost of debt and the cost of equity, respectively, whereas governance and aggregated ESG are positively related to leverage. The results predominantly support Trade-off theory, suggesting that firms seek to balance the benefits and costs of ESG performance. In Article 3, the ESG pillars exhibited a positive relationship with Return on Assets (ROA), while the Governance pillar showed a positive relationship with Tobin’s Q, consistent with Stakeholder theory, although these effects are sensitive to firm size. The general limitations of this thesis include the absence of lagged variables and, specifically in Article 2, the lack of reverse causality tests.