ESG Disclosure and Short-term Return After IPO: A study of the ESG indicators of Norwegian new listing companies in 2020 and their returns

Abstract

With the concept of sustainability gaining traction in the business world, ESG indicators are beginning to be used by investors as one of their investment metrics. While global finances were hit hard by the pandemic in 2020, there was an extraordinary surge of new listing companies in Norway. In this paper, we try to investigate whether the ESG disclosure in the prospectus or information document (admission document) filed by Norwegian companies during their listing procedure in 2020 has an impact on their short-term share price returns. We divide the textual analysis into two dimensions, ESG term frequency and sentiment analysis. We use the ESG basis vector to construct our own ESG dictionaries and use them as the benchmark for our textual analysis. We mainly use multiple linear regression to explore the relationship between variables but also attempt to fit several machine learning models. From the results of the regression analysis, underpricing is the most sensitive to ESG indicators, as environmental term frequency, environmental sentiment and governance sentiment are all significantly correlated with it. In contrast, 3-day return is not significantly related to any ESG indicator; 1-week return and 1-month return are significantly related to environmental term frequency and governance sentiment, respectively.