We provide evidence that ENV is an important determinant of the capital structure for publicly traded oil and gas companies. Our findings are robust when we use either raw social responsibility scores or the percentiles of those social responsibility variables. We also find that Beta and Dividend Payout are statistically significant. ENV is the only significant individual component of ESG, which implies that oil and gas companies with better environmental ratings choose lower leverage. While none of the other ESG variables such as ESG, SOC and GOV, are significant it is worth noting that ESG and SOC are always negative and GOV is always positive. Controversy is also consistently positive and but not consistently significant.
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