ESG Score and Market Value: The Role of the Family Firm Evidence from the Italian Listed Market

In recent years, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices and disclosure has become a critical component of corporate finance and accounting. Indeed, increasingly, companies seek to demonstrate their accountability to the environment and society in order to meet the expectations of different stakeholders interested in ESG performance (Garcia-Sanchez & Garcia-Sanchez, 2020). Customers, regulators, employees, suppliers, social and activist groups, media and lenders are all potential stakeholders in sustainability accountability (Arif et al., 2021; Camilleri, 2015; Sajjad et al., 2020). Nevertheless, the shareholders, institutional investors and individuals, looking to invest their money in firms with sustainable finance goals and high levels of ESG performance (Lourenço et al., 2014). Companies are supposed to make and disclose sustainable initiatives in organizational decisions (Garcia-Sanchez et al., 2014) and managers convey the focus of their efforts towards a more sustainable environment and society paying much attention to ESG indicators (Broadstock et al., 2019). This paper investigates the value of ESG score for family firms (FF) and non-family firms (NFF). Stemming from previous studies (Martínez-Ferrero & Frías-Aceituno, 2015), ESG performance in family business context is still unexplored. Indeed, most of the scholars have focused their effort on exploring the adoption of FF’s non-financial disclosure while, to the best of our knowledge, no one has investigated the effect of the type of firm (family or non-family) in the relationship between non-financial performance (ESG) and financial performance. The results of the analyzes demonstrate that there is no significant relationship between non-financial performance (ESG performance) and the value of companies. Indeed, for both the hypotheses there is just a positive but non-significant correlation. This evidence was verified for both FF and NFF panel.