Investor types and trading of the environment, social and governance stocks in the Stock Exchange of Thailand

Abstract

This study involves finding how the Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) or the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) affects investors’ attention in the Stock Exchange of Thailand. The goal is to examine whether there is any interest in investing on the companies with good ESG or CSR practice in the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) represented by those in the Environment Social and Governance 100 (ESG100) list by Thaipat Institution or in the Thailand Sustainability Investment (TSI) list by SET, announced during 2014-2015. Conducting an event study, upon examination of these events, the result shows that there are significantly negative abnormal returns of the TSI list. On the other hand, there are less significantly negative for the abnormal returns after announcement for the ESG100 list. As the result of CAAR is very economically small for daily and yearly returns, investors are unlikely to be able to exploit the abnormal returns for trading strategy. In addition, this research study further examines which types of investors are more concerned about the companies advocating for CSR and finds that foreign investors concern more CSR stocks than institutional investors and institutional investors concern CSR stocks less than individual investors but there are no significant comparing foreign investors with individual investors for the method that uses percentage of buy and sell to compute trade imbalance, while there is no significant difference across investor types for trade imbalance calculated using levels of buy and sell method.