This paper investigates whether and how business sustainability performance and disclosure factors affect stock price informativeness (SPI). We find that non-financial environmental, social, and governance (ESG) sustainability performance factors are positively associated with idiosyncratic volatility (our proxy for SPI) after controlling for financial-economic performance. We further show that the association between sustainability performance factors and SPI is stronger for firms with higher sustainability disclosure. We find that the association between ESG sustainability performance factors and SPI is stronger when economic performance is weaker, suggesting that investors tend to pay more attention to ESG performance factors when firms are financially underperforming. This study shows that investors pay attention to both firm economic performance (corporate profitability and growth prospect) and ESG sustainability performance and disclosure factors, which have implications for policymakers, regulators, investors, businesses, and researchers.

Business sustainability has emerged as the theme of the 21st century. We examine whether and how different components of economic sustainability disclosure (ECON), as well as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions of sustainability performance affect cost of equity, individually and in aggregate. In addition, we investigate whether and how ECON and ESG sustainability interactively affect cost of equity capital. Costs of equity are calculated using industry adjusted earnings–price ratios and finite horizon expected return model. Using a sample of more than 3000 firms during 1990–2013, we find that ECON (ESG) is negatively associated with cost of equity, but only growth and research (environmental and governance) sustainability performance dimensions contribute to this relationship. Operation efficiency is positively, while social sustainability performance is only marginally, related to cost of equity. We also find that ECON and ESG sustainability performance interactively affect cost of equity. In general, the relationship between ECON (ESG) and cost of capital is strengthened when ESG (ECON) performance is strong.

We show that stock prices of firms with gender-diverse boards reflect more firm-specific information after controlling for corporate governance, earnings quality, institutional ownership and acquisition activity. Further, we show that the relationship is stronger for firms with weak corporate governance suggesting that gender-diverse boards could act as a substitute mechanism for corporate governance that would be otherwise weak. The results are robust to alternative specifications of informativeness and gender diversity and to sensitivity tests controlling for time-invariant firm characteristics and alternative measures of stock price informativeness. We also find that gender diversity improves stock price informativeness through the mechanism of increased public disclosure in large firms and by encouraging private information collection in small firms.