This paper investigates the role of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance in stock prices during the market financial crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We use the Chinese listed company data as the bases for adopting an event-study method to identify the impact of ESG performance on cumulative abnormal returns. Empirical results suggest that ESG performance significantly increases firms’ cumulative abnormal returns and has asymmetric effects during the pandemic. Our results are robust to various robustness checks that consider the replacement of event window period, ESG measurement, adding other control variables, and sample exclusion of Hubei Province. We further find that reputation and insurance effects are important mechanisms through which ESG performance influences stock prices. Lastly, heterogeneous analyses show that ESG effects are considerably pronounced among firms with low human capital and bad image and in high-impact regions.

This study examines the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on bilateral trade between East and South Asian emerging economies, including their related trading partners. We cover the bilateral data on trade and FDI from June 2001 to June 2019. We estimate an augmented gravity model of trade to examine the study sample. This study is the first to use the Mundlak approaches an alternative for the fixed effect model to empirically estimate the relationship between FDI and trade among the countries in the region. Results show that free trade agreements (FTAs) and the corruption perception index (CPI) significantly and positively affect bilateral trade. However, the distance variable has become insignificant after introducing the FTA variable to the model. This finding indicates that FTAs marginalize the effect of distance on bilateral trade between the member countries. Thus, policymakers in developing countries should encourage and liberalize FDI from developing countries to enhance the bilateral trade volume.

Natural gas is an important energy resource that is used to produce the national output of Pakistan.On the other hand, since natural gas is a relatively cleaner energy resource compared to oil and coal, enhancing the level of natural gas use is believed to improve the environmental quality in Pakistan which, in turn, can be expected to enable the nation to sustain its economic performances. Hence, it is pertinent to assess the effects of natural gas consumption on the nation’s economic growth level.The main objective of this paper was to explore the asymmetric effects of natural gas consumption, controlling for financial development, on Pakistan's economic growth level over the 1965–2019 period. The results from the Augmented Dickey-Fuller, Phillips-Perron, and Zivot-Andrews unit root tests confirmed a mixed order of integration among the variables. Besides, the bounds test and Gregory-Hansen cointegration analysis revealed evidence of long-run associations between economic growth, natural gas consumption, and financial development. Moreover, the outcomes from the non-linear autoregressive distributed lag model showed thatin the short-run positive changes in the natural gas consumption levels increase economic growth in Pakistan. On the other hand, in the long-run, positive and negative changes in natural gas consumption levels increase and decrease the economic growth level, respectively, in the long-run. On the other hand, both positive and negative changes in the financial development level are found to reduce the economic growth level in the long-run. Furthermore, the Hacker-Hatemi-J causality analysis verifiedthat natural gas consumption influences the economic growth level in Pakistan; thus, the energy consumption-led growth phenomenon was unearthed. In line with these key findings, several policy level suggestions are put forward for Pakistan to boost its natural gas consumption figures in order to enhance its economic growth level in the future.