TASK-SWITCHING TAXES IN OPEN-PLAN OFFICES: MINIMUM UNINTERRUPTED FOCUS BLOCKS FOR ERROR REDUCTION

Abstract

This paper analyses the consequences of green-hushing, the underreporting of ESG practices, in marked public stock market indices such as the FTSE 100, the S&P 500 and the DAX 30 which has a wide mix of industries in technology, finance, healthcare, and consumer goods among others. The literature employs archival, such as ESG scores that are provided by MSCI ESG and Sustainalytics and financial performance that are provided by Bloomberg and Reuters, which covers 500 companies between 2015 and 2023. Green-hushing has been operationalized as a binary factor in such a way that firms ranked in the lower half of their industry on ESG disclosure scores are considered to have been green-hushing. The dependent variable is stock returns calculated as annualized change in price adjusted by dividends and some of the control variables used include firm size, profitability, market-to-book ratio, and industry fixed effects. Measuring the causal impact of green-hushing on the stock returns, the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) design isolates the effect of green-hushing with the consideration of time-invariant characteristics and time-varying parameters considered. The robustness checks, which are alternative estimators, placebo tests, and bootstrapping, are applied to determine the results. It is an ethical study since it considers publicly available information and confidentiality. The paper seeks to give an insight regarding how green-hushing affects stock performance and efficiency in reporting ESG, which is of great value to investors and those making decisions on behalf of companies.