Impacts of carbon and energy aspects on financial performance: a case study

Abstract

Companies attempt to find ways of improving environmental performance and financial performance simultaneously while maintaining a balance between their actions and consequences for climate change. The primary objective of this study is to investigate the impacts of carbon and energy aspects on corporate financial performance using available dataset for Turkish listed companies. Financial performance is measured by both an accounting-based indicator, return on assets (ROA) and a market-based indicator, Tobin's q. The main finding stemmed from the estimated panel data regressions is twofold. The first one implies that carbon performance has a positive impact on ROA, which is a sign of the possibility of simultaneous improvement in both environmental performance and profitability. Our second main finding is that carbon performance and energy performance do not affect Tobin's q revealing that the market does not respond either positively or negatively to environmental performance of firms in Turkey.