In this paper we investigate the relationship between Corporate Social Responsibility performance (CSP) and firms’ financial standing – corporate financial performance (CFP) in ten Global Industry Classification System (GICS) sectors. The analysis of each sector provides unique opportunity of finding these CSR actions which nowadays play the most important role. We use Thomson Reuters ASSET4 ratings in order to proxy the CSR behaviour of 7942 companies from all over the world. We find CSR actions’ effects measured by value increase as well as transitory effect on earnings conditional upon the company’s sector. Firstly, we prove that eco-efficiency investments are value destructors in 8 out 10 sectors. For corporate governance we find significant results only in three sectors with ambiguous characteristic. Despite of adding the third, Social dimension we observe relatively lesser impact of CSR actions on firms’ financial performance in case of four sectors.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.27.2.13480

The aim of the paper is to reveal how corporate social performance (CSP) affects market value and earnings capabilities of companies from banking industry: Banking Services and Investment Banking & Investment Services sub-industries in particular. For Banking Services, the research was extended to a link between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance (CSP-CFP) by classifying institutions into clusters based on a type of culture which dominates in a bank’s country of origin. Regression analysis was run on a unique dataset, which comprehensively captures the contextuality of CSP, measured with corporate governance, environmental and social characteristics. This research uses Refinitiv database of ESG Scores as CSP proxy for banks from all over the world in the period of 2009–2016. The results confirm that environmental performance and social performance have negative impact on CFP in banks and partly confirmed that governance performance has a positive impact on their CFP. This research proves that banks’ CSP performance and the CSP-CFP relationship differs with regard to the type of bank operations as well as the associated culture. This is an important conclusion for investors seeking to increase value of their holdings and bank management who wants to foster bank’s profitability through CSP-related decisions.

The paper concerns the role of the banking sector in renewable energy financing in Poland. The main goal of the paper is to provide recommendations for the banking sector in Poland, which can be used in the process of financing RES. The main methods used in the paper are the thorough analysis of the solutions used to finance RES in different countries and multivariate analysis of options presented on the ordinal scale. The first finding is the answer to the question of which financial instruments used by banks are the most effective in the financing of RES. It is based on the prepared ranking of different instruments used by banks in the process of renewable energy financing, by assessing the structure and value of required financing for renewable energy based on future scenarios. The second finding in the paper is the set of recommendations for the banking sector and policymakers as to financing renewable energy sources in Poland. The main conclusion is that renewable energy financing through the instruments available in the banking sector is efficient and is characterized by relatively low risk.