Does environmental, social and governance performance influence economic performance?

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the influence of environmental, social and governance performance on the economic performance of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Structural equation modeling and linear regression have been utilized to measure the overall and individual influence of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance on economic performance using longitudinal data comprising the years from 2010 to 2015. The overall ESG model had a significant relationship on economic performance. Furthermore, the findings of this study show that social and governance performance significantly affects economic performance in all regression models. However, environmental performance failed to show a significant relationship. The research contributes to the literature by providing insights for investors, managers and employees about the influence of ESG performance on company performance.