COVID-19: are sustainable companies more resilient to unexpected crises?

The aim of this work was to verify whether firms that showed greater sustainability performance before the COVID-19 crisis have been more resilient in the months following the pandemic outbreak. In particular, I measured the impact of greater ESG scores, and then social and environmental pillars scores, on the companies’ revenue-based severity of loss, calculated as the growth in revenues from sales between 2019 and 2020. To perform the analysis, I collected ESG and financial data about public firms headquartered in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland, resulting in a final sample of 723 firms. I then ran OLS and logit regressions for the second, third, and fourth quarter of comparison between 2020 and 2019. The results of this preliminary analysis are unconclusive and do not provide a universal and always true relationship between Corporate Sustainability and Organizational Resilience, pointing to the importance to study this relationship using a fine-grained approach, considering for specificities of companies and of the aspect of sustainability analyzed. Indeed, some results indicated a negative relationship, others provided evidence for a positive relationship, some others resulted to be non-significant prohibiting to draw any conclusions. However, insights that emerged by studying the CS-OR relationship keep open the possibility for firms and society for achieving a way of conducting economic activities that would be beneficial for Profit, Planet, and People, in an integrated way.