Market Reactions to Corporate Environmental Performance Related Events: A Meta-analytic Consolidation of the Empirical Evidence

Research on the relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) has consistently grown and is gaining widespread attention. Given the vast body of CEP–CFP studies, recently scholars have begun to take stock of the cumulative results. However, no study so far has meta-analyzed the findings yielded by event studies assessing the stock market reactions to corporate environmental performance-related events (CEP-related events). This paper sets out to close this gap by synthesizing previous empirical results regarding the stock market impact of positive and negative CEP-related events. Results indicate a positive relationship across studies in terms of positive market reactions to positive events and negative reactions to negative events. Furthermore, the findings show that the market reactions are stronger for negative events than for positive events (i.e., asymmetry in the stock market reaction). Finally, this study examines whether methodological artifacts (i.e., differences in the study designs) may explain the differences in the findings of the analyzed event studies.