McGuire et al (1988)

McGuire, Jean B., Alison Sundgren, and Thomas Schneeweiss. “Corporate Social Responsibility and Firm Financial Performance.” Academy of Management Journal, December 1988.

From the author’s abstract: “Using Fortune magazine's ratings of corporate reputations, we analyzed the relationships between perceptions of firms' corporate social responsibility and measures of their financial performance. Results show that a firm's prior performance, assessed by both stock-market returns and accounting-based measures, is more closely related to corporate social responsibility than is subsequent performance. Results also show that measures of risk are more closely associated with social responsibility than previous studies have suggested.”

LK comment: A notable early paper on the relationship between ESG factors and financial performance.

Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/256342?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents