The impact of sustainable practices on the financial performance of stocks in IPOs

A literature review

Abstract

There is a growing interest from society, markets, and academia in understanding the impact of sustainable practices on companies' financial performance. However, the analysis of this relationship—in an initial public offering (IPO) process—is still in its early stages. Nevertheless, research conducted to date suggests an investigation of existing literature, as well as the proposition of future avenues on the subject. Therefore, this study aims to perform a bibliometric analysis and systematic review on the impact of sustainable practices on the financial performance of shares—in an IPO process. Both analyses are carried out using the ten steps proposed by the Bibliometric-Systematic Literature Review (BSLR) methodology. The articles in the sample are obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. As a result, there is confirmation of Bradford and Lotka's bibliometric laws, identification of keywords, patterns of collaboration between countries and researchers, as well as the most prominent journals. Furthermore, the (sub)categorization matrix points to the main aspects already analyzed and presents gaps for future investigations regarding theories, econometric models, proxies for (in)dependent variables, types and origin of the analyzed data, as well as the main results obtained on the investigated topic. Beyond academia, companies, regulators, and governments benefit from the results of this research in guiding investment decisions, as well as in defining sustainable policies as a means of stimulating the health of capital markets.