The Pricing of ESG: Evidence From Overnight Return and Intraday Return

Abstract

By featuring the link of investor heterogeneity to the persistence of the overnight and intraday components of returns, we examine the ESG–overnight (intraday) alpha relation in the Chinese stock market. The empirical results show that ESG score has a significantly negative effect on the expected stock overnight returns in Fama–MacBeth regression. Consistently, given the biggest market capitalization and the least illiquidity subsamples, the trading strategies by going long (short) the top (bottom) ESG quintile would yield negative profits. In addition, we conduct the implication of the ESG pricing by dividing the full sample into green stock subsample and sin stock subsample, and the empirical results present that the ESG pricing is pervasive of the green-type stocks. These conclusions verify the pricing of ESG and support the conjecture that green stocks have lower expected returns because ESG investors value sustainability.