Are ESG-committed hotels financially resilient to the COVID-19 pandemic? An autoregressive jump intensity trend model.

Given that the United Nations views environmental, social, and governance (ESG) as a practical framework for anchoring responsible corporate behavior to achieve its sustainable development goals, this study constructs an autoregressive jump intensity trend (ARJI-trend) model to determine if ESG can improve future resilience and create crisis-resilient value for chained-brand hotel corporations from the effects of COVID-19. The findings indicate that the ARJI-trend model indeed captures both the permanent and transitory components of the hotel corporation's ESG performance related to stock return dynamics. When ESG rating is taken into account, the following conclusions emerge: 1) the transitory component of time-varying return variance decreases but the permanent component does not; 2) the hotel corporation portfolios with a lower transitory component experiences a higher return, implying that the hotel corporations with a higher ESG rating appear to be more defensiveness; and 3) with proper asset reallocation, a portfolio centered on strong ESG-conscious hotel corporations is a safe-haven asset during market turmoil.

Understanding how ESG-focused airlines reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock returns.

Incorporating environmental-social-governance (ESG) into a company's operations is an innovation strategy for contemporary businesses and a countermeasure for airline companies under COVID-19's influence. This research employs an autoregressive jump intensity trend (ARJI-trend) model to analyze the effects of COVID-19 and ESG ratings on the stock performance of the U.S. airline industry. We find that the ARJI-trend model captures the short- and long-run impacts of COVID-19 and ESG on stock return dynamics. Moreover, short-run stock return volatility converges to the original equilibrium level faster when a company has a higher ESG score, implying that promoting ESG does offer a defense mechanism to airline companies and that ESG performance is suitable for integration into business operational goals. The results lay the groundwork for understanding how an ESG focus might help airline companies to suffer less of an economic/financial impact during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.