Social responsibility and bank resiliency

Abstract

We find strong evidence that measures of social responsibility contribute to increasing the resilience of banks. This finding holds when social responsibility is measured by aggregated ESG scores provided by Thomson Reuters, both according to their older Asset 4 categorization and to the reformed ESG Refinitiv classification, and resilience is proxied by various measures of systemic and systematic risk. The results hold on the level of subcategories of the ESG pillars, where we find that, particularly, variables related to the long-term perspective enhance resilience. Moreover, in our international study, we find significant transatlantic differences.