During recent times of uncertainty, sustainable marketing and sustainable finance became hot research topics attracting both academics and practitioners. Although centering marketing efforts around the firm’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policies allow for creating a superior image and increasing brand value, the incorporation of ESG/CSR activities might seem to be costly and have been claimed to not provide direct marketing benefits. This study aims to explore the impact of firms’ ESG/CSR engagement on marketing expenses and firms’ market value to provide a strategic rationale for firms to undertake ESG/CSR activities to position their companies distinctly in the marketplace accordingly. The study employs a panel regression to analyze the impact of ESG and CSR commitments on a firm’s marketing expenses in a sample of S&P 500 firms in the United States. The results indicate that the firms with higher CSR engagement spend proportionately lesser on their marketing expenses and entertain a higher market value. The results also suggest that the firm’s board size, board diversity, and social engagement considerably enhance the firm’s market value. The results indicate that focusing on firms’ environmental responsibility alone does not sufficiently contribute to enhancing the value of the firm, stakeholders are rather more concerned about the firm’s societal engagement which must, therefore, be overtly communicated and reported.

Motivated by agency theory, this study seeks to understand the effect of the country-level national governance system on the extent of corporate risk-taking in the MENA region. The study employs a two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) approach to evaluate the influence of governance indicators on the firms’ risk-taking behavior in 459 non-financial firms listed in eight emerging capital markets in the MENA markets (Iraq, Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) region from 2010 to 2019. The results suggest that countries with better national governance systems tend to incentivize businesses to undertake risky activities and projects, particularly due to low levels of government predation and efficient resource allocation. The results also imply that the economies with stronger governance policies and systems tend to have relatively stable macroeconomic environments and less uncertainty in the government policies, and therefore, the managers are motivated to undertake projects with higher risk-return metrics with a considerable potential to contribute to the country’s economic growth.

In this study, we provide new evidence on the relationship between crude oil, exchange rate and stock returns before and after the official announcement of COVID-19 as a pandemic by WHO. Data for the present study consists of the major stock indices of ten emerging markets (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Taiwan and Thailand), their exchange rates, And prices of Brent crude oil. We employ panel vector autoregression and provide evidence based on panel granger causality, impulse response function and forecast error variance decomposition. Panel granger causality reveals that after the declaration of COVID-19 as pandemic, interdependence between oil price changes and stock returns has increased. We find positive (negative) impact of oil market (exchange rate) shocks on stock returns. Analysis of impulse response suggests that during pandemic shocks to crude oil, exchange rate and stock market have larger and longer own and cross-market impact. Thus, there is a need for sharing timely and adequate information to minimize uncertainties in financial and commodity markets. This would benefit investors by lessening the transmission of shocks during the times of crisis.