Investment certainty in ESG investing due to COVID-19: evidence from India

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the impact of COVID-19 on the volatility of ESG investing in India. Furthermore, it assesses the investment certainty in ESG related activities in India after detecting the first case of disease. A generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model has been applied to the S&P BSE 100 ESG Index returns. The results show that after COVID-19, the risk related to the market price of the S&P BSE 100 ESG Index has increased, and the certainty of investment decreased. Further, the result of the GARCH (1, 1) model estimation indicates the presence of a large degree of persistency in the S&P BSE 100 ESG index. In addition, after reporting the first case of COVID-19, unconditional variance has been increased by 211.98%.