Corporate Environmental Sustainability and Financial Constraints
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Byun Hee Sub 
Published: December 2024

While the policy and practical interest in corporate environmental sustainability (CES) activities in Korea’s capital market has sharply expanded, the expected effects have not been actively investigated. Existing literature mainly focuses on the relevance of firm value to identify the benefits and costs of CES activities. However, firms should establish the optimal management strategy corresponding to internal characteristics and environmental factors. From this point of view, there is a limit in specifying the expected effect of CES activities only with the relevance of firm value. Moreover, since the firm value contains a mixture of information, it is difficult to determine in detail which corporate decision makings or its outcomes are associated with CES activities. Meanwhile, the existence of conflicting views on CES activities adds to the need to empirically verify its expected effects. In this regard, the positive view of CES activities focuses on benefits from improved management efficiency through reduced production costs, proactive response to potential regulatory risks, and smooth financing through mitigation of information asymmetry. Negative views, on the other hand, argue that under the agency theory, CES activities can be exploited to meet managers’ incentives for overinvestment and thus not have sufficient benefits corresponding to huge investment costs. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the relationship between CES activities and various management behaviors and to identify the paths of generating benefits and costs of it.
This study empirically investigates the impact of CES activities on financial constraints, using Korean firms. Financial constraints should be addressed preemptively in streamlining financial decision-makings such as investment, financing, and dividends, and efficient control of it can contribute to maximizing the shareholder value. There can be a considerable relationship between CES activities and financial constraints, based on the fact that CES activities involve significant initial investment costs for improved production processes and facility investment. If the benefits of CES activities are not realized, financial constraints will be expanded. This will ultimately have a negative impact on not realizing the firm’s own growth opportunities. On the other hand, if the benefits of CES activities, such as the increase of internal cash flows and improvement of external financing conditions, are realized, it will contribute to expanding the sustainability of management activities by mitigating financial constraints.
Empirically, we find that active implementation of CES activities expands financial constraints. This result means that sufficient benefits to cover the investment costs associated with CES activities are not realized. On the other hand, this effect is mainly observed in firms with low ownership of controlling families, low ownership of foreign investors, or high discretionary accruals. This suggests that the main results of our study can be interpreted on the basis of the possibility that the CES activities could be exploited as a means of overinvestment proposed in the previous studies. In addition, CES activities are not likely to contribute to the improvement of shareholder value in firms with high financial constraints. This suggests that financial constraints can be perceived as a path to drive the relationship between CES activities and firm value in existing studies.
The results of this study suggest that the indiscriminate expansion of CES activities in the Korean capital market may act as a constraint on corporate management based on the possibility of the agency problem.