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Considering the standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), this study aims to examine whether the link between material sustainability and financial performance depends on the extent to which the company is oriented toward stakeholders.

To test the predictions, 13,942 firm-year observations from 43 different countries are used, covering the period from 2010 to 2019. Using a hand-mapping approach to match the indicators suggested by the SASB with those of the ASSET4, the authors realize that there are 170 material sustainability indicators among 466 indicators of the ASSET4. The authors use three different methods to verify if the materiality matters, including the alphas obtained from the Fama and French factor models, comparing the average abnormal returns of the portfolios and the bootstrapped Cramer technique.

The findings show that companies investing in material sustainability activities perform better than those investing in immaterial activities. Also, consistent with the theoretical foundations, the authors find that the effect of investing in material sustainability activities is more pronounced in stakeholder-oriented countries than that in shareholder-oriented countries. The results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests.

Owing to COVID-19 in late 2019, data from 2020 to 2022 have not been used to obtain reliable results.

The results obtained in the current research provide valuable guidance for investors to make investments considering the degree of materiality of sustainability activities in different industries. It also helps managers to increase the company’s financial performance, make efficient decisions related to investment in sustainability activities and find investment strategies on the material sustainability issues in their industries.

This study provides a clearer understanding of investment in sustainability activities in different industries by separating material and immaterial sustainability activities in stakeholder and shareholder-oriented countries, and the results obtained can change the perspective of investors and company managers regarding investing in such activities in different countries. Investing in more materiality sustainability activities than the immateriality dimension can be new opportunities for companies to achieve predetermined goals, help retain and attract business partners or be a source of innovation for new product lines or services. Internal morale and employee engagement may increase while increasing productivity and firm performance. This discussion opens the way for future research.

This study provides insight into the effect of investing in material and immaterial sustainability activities in different industries on the company’s performance in shareholder and stakeholder-oriented countries.

Previous literature posits that corporate governance and information asymmetry are the main factors in making efficient investments. Meanwhile, a growing body of studies is of the opinion that corporate governance can also mitigate the problem of information asymmetry and consequently exerts significant impacts on the association between information asymmetry and investment efficiency. This study aims to analyze the impact of corporate governance and information asymmetry on investment efficiency. It also tests the moderating role of corporate governance in the relationship between information asymmetry and investment efficiency.

The sample consists of 4,082 firms domiciled in 20 developed countries over the years from 2003 to 2019, including 33,812 firm-year observations. The bid–ask spread is used as a proxy for information asymmetry. To measure corporate governance performance, a proxy provided by ASSET4 is employed, and to determine the optimal levels of investments, we relied on the growth opportunity. To estimate the models, ordinary least squares and generalized method of moment are used.

The results reveal that information asymmetry is inversely related to investment efficiency, and, corporate governance mitigates this negative association.

This paper sheds light on the role of corporate governance in firms as a lever for mitigating information asymmetry and tries out information asymmetry and agency theories in relation to the impact of information asymmetry on investment efficiency. It also confirms the theory stating that corporate governance can be considered as a determinant of investment efficiency.