Corporate Website Values and Stock Market Prospects of Companies Espousing Environmental and Social Responsibility

Joanna Żukowska, Michał Bernardelli, Tiit Elenurm

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand how values related to environmental and social responsibility are espoused on the websites of listed companies in Poland, Finland and Estonia, and to what extent these values are connected to investors’ beliefs about the growth prospects of stock market value. Content analysis of corporate websites is combined with information from company profiles in stock market databases, reflecting the business sector, size, and P/E ratios of these companies as indicators of investors’ beliefs regarding long-term value growth. 
The study focuses on how declaring environmental and social sustainability values aligns with innovations intended to convince investors about the sustainability of future business growth when choosing which shares to buy. The findings show that listed companies in the three countries most often espouse cooperation in combination with with innovation and respect. The positive connection between espousing values related to social and environmental responsibility and a high price-to-earnings ratio on stock markets was not supported in the total sample. 
The research is limited by the fact that it compares countries with a different stock market role due to differences in population, economic development history, and current gross domestic product. The value of this study lies in filling a research gap by examining the impact of environmental and societal values on investors’ perceptions in Central and Eastern European countries.

Keywords: corporate values, stock market, social responsibility, environment, Central and Eastern Europe

Introduction

The development stages of corporate social responsibility and their business implications depend on the interpretations of stakeholders (Faller & Knyphausen-Aufseß, 2018; Wójcik, 2018). This paper investigates the link between perceptions of companies about their meaningful corporate values in the context of their business growth, shareholders’ value creation, and the level of corporate commitment to address social and ecological issues in their value statements. Both platform economy development trends and challenges related to climate change assume multistakeholder cooperation between industrial actors, policymakers and scientists (Elia et al., 2020).

Value statements reflect beliefs, philosophies and principles that a company claims to follow in its business development (Roth, 2013), and are directed to shareholders, customers, employees and other business stakeholders (Markovic et al., 2023). Value statements on company websites are influenced by company management efforts to consider the short- and long-term interests of different stakeholders, with companies accountable for their impact on all relevant stakeholders, and the aim of corporate social responsibility (CSR) assuming the creation of value for all stakeholders and society (Arora et al., 2020; Strazzullo et al., 2023).

The European Commission has defined CSR as the concept whereby companies integrate social and environment concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with stakeholders on a voluntary basis. The renewed E.U. strategy 2011-14 for corporate social responsibility stated that social responsibility requires engagement with internal and external stakeholders, enabling enterprises to better anticipate and respond to rapidly-changing societal expectations and operating conditions, and thereby driving the development of new markets and creating opportunities for growth (European Commission, 2011).

The responsibility of enterprises for their impact on society assumes addressing social, environmental, ethical, consumer and human rights concerns in their business strategy. In recent years, Towards a Sustainable Europe by 2030, in line with the United Nations 17 sustainable development goals (European Commission, 2019), focuses on corporate social responsibility towards future generations and assumes taking care of the natural environment and the sustainability of our planet. Declaring corporate values is a way to engage internal and external stakeholders to assess an organisation’s commitment to social responsibility and sustainability, with companies expected to build a shared sense of their core values and adapt their actions to the values and norms of their society (Barchiesi & Colladon, 2021). Sustainable business development is influenced by the ability of listed companies to raise money on the stock market.

Our objective is to determine which combinations of sustainability-focused and environment- and society-focused values, along with other values espoused by companies on their websites, are related to the growth of their stock market value. The paper addresses two interconnected research questions:

1. How do value statements on corporate webpages relate to the green agenda and corporate responsibility to resist climate change, and which other values are associated with environment- and sustainability-oriented values in strengthening corporate social responsibility?
2. Does espousing sustainability- and environment and society-oriented values lead to growth of investors’ trust in corporate long-term value reflected in price/earnings (P/E) ratios?

This paper compares values that are stated by companies listed on the stock exchanges of three European Union member states – Poland, Finland and Estonia, with this particular choice of countries enabling a comparison of listed companies in Poland as a large country with Finnish and Estonian companies representing smaller economies, where attracting international investors and foreign customers is essential. Comparing Finnish companies with those from Estonia and Poland allows for an understanding of the differences between the value statements of companies from an advanced market economy and two converging economies, as well as comparing companies from large and small economies.

Explicit value statements may reflect what corporate decision-makers would like their significant stakeholders to believe the organisation desires to be. These statements do not guarantee that a company walks the talk, although corporate websites do have an impact on how internal and external stakeholders perceive an organisation's current behaviour and future intentions. Their perceptions influence decisions to buy company shares, commit to the company strategy as an employee or cooperate with this organisation as a business partner.

The paper contributes to understanding the relationships between social and environmental responsibility and values focused on innovation, cooperation and business growth, as well as highlighting the complexity of investors’ perceptions of companies’ business prospects that promote such values on their websites.

Literature Review and Hypotheses

Values motivate action and serve as a departure point for decision-making by individuals and organisations. Schwartz's (2015) theory of basic human values specified ten types of values: (1) self-direction, based on an individual’s independent thought and action; (2) stimulation, which refers to an individual's orientation toward novelty; (3) hedonism, which is connected with self-gratification and pleasure; (4) achievement-related personal success within social standards; (5) power, driven by prestige and dominance over people; (6) security, which refers to safety, stability and harmony; (7) conformity, related to not harming people and obedience toward the norms of society; (8) tradition, which explains individual's connection and relationship with culture and religion; (9) benevolence, linked to welfare preservation or enhancement of a group of which an individual is a member; and (10) universalism, encompassing good intentions, tolerance and appreciation toward nature and other people. Corporate stated values may emphasise certain individual values more than others, reflecting owners’ and managers' views on the human resources and competencies relevant to business strategy. The development of Industry 4.0, along with innovative, agile and multicultural organisational contexts, will also influence leaders’ values at such workplaces (Sharma, 2018). Through corporate value statements, leaders can share their priorities with employees. Črešnar and Nedelko (2020) found that Industry 4.0 requires, above anything, universal, benevolent, and, in general, self-transcendence personal values.

Values can be seen as the ideals and principles that guide the thoughts and behaviour in organisations towards the future (Blanchard & Stoner, 2004), with corporate value statements of their core values communicating what organisations both stand for and strive for (Anderson & Jamison, 2015; Ehrenhard & Fiorito, 2018). A mission-based approach to organisational values by Malbašić, Rey, and Potočan (2015) distinguishes organisational values reflecting the organisational orientation towards change, with values ranging between stability and progress, and the orientation towards the environment, with values ranging between self-orientation and social orientation. Enhancing employee work ethics and social responsibility assumes combining innovation-related values with other values (Zhang et al., 2022). We assume that in countries at different stages of developing innovation- and knowledge-based economies, the composition of espoused values - including values reflecting organisational ties to society and concern for the environmental - may differ.

Hypothesis 1. Companies in Poland, Finland and Estonia stress different values on their websites.

Studying espoused values on corporate websites can reveal competing value statements used by the management to address different internal and external stakeholders. Several decades ago, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) differentiated strategic organisational values based on four bipolar dimensions: (1) organisational focus (internal, person-oriented vs external, organisation-oriented) and (2) structure (stability and control vs flexibility and change). Beus et al. (2020) used this competing values framework for meta-analysis of research on clan, adhocracy, hierarchy and market climates as manifestations of conflicting yet often coexisting strategic values, concluding that divergent values related to these organisational climate types can, at times, impose competing demands on employees, blur perceptions of organisational identity, and complicate sensemaking.

Tessema et al. (2019) studied the value statements of companies listed on the New York stock exchange and found that 85% of the sample companies had a commitment to the integrity value dimension, while around 64% of the sample companies had a commitment to customers’ value dimension. Some value statements were generic, such as integrity, valuing employees, trust and honesty, with more specific value statements involving explicit context-specific descriptions of how values are pursued.

Tosti-Kharas, Lamm, and Thomas (2017) discussed two primary rationales for why employees believe it is essential for their organisations to behave sustainably - they might believe sustainability is inherently important as an end in itself, or that sustainability is instrumentally important in that it makes good business sense or both.

Barchiesi and La Bella's (2014) classification of values is based on stakeholders' interests: what organisations do for customers/users, for employees; what organisations do to obtain outstanding/excellent results, obtain profits and financial growth orientation, for integrity and social responsibility. A distinction was made between citizenship (social responsibility commitments prescribed by law) and social responsibility based on the voluntariness of socially responsible actions. Their analysis of Twitter discourse on the core values of the world’s most admired companies, differentiated by stakeholder category, revealed different prevailing interests. The importance attributed by stakeholders to CSR (citizenship and social responsibility together) was low, with only core values related to excellence receiving less attention from stakeholders. As different stakeholder groups influence value statements, the list of espoused values may reflect contradictions between the short-term and long-term values of these groups, including customer-focused values and other values related to CSR and business results.

Bassetti, Blasi, and Sedita (2021) concluded from a longitudinal analysis that green companies have the capacity to generate income comparable to that of non-green companies while using less capital, with sustainability-oriented value statements serving as a tool to attract investments needed for ambitious social impact. For companies listed on stock markets, a common objective is to increase market capitalisation by motivating investors to value their shares highly, reflecting expectations of future growth and profitability.

Hypothesis 2. Companies that have espoused social responsibility values and environment-related values have higher price-to-earnings per share (P/E) ratios than companies that do not stress these values.

Mission statements of companies involve a degree of impression management (Bartkus & Glassman, 2008), with essential contradictions between declared values and the real actions of organisations. Bourne et al. (2019) state that values such as ‘sustainability’, ‘care for the environment’, ‘social responsibility’ and ‘ethical practice’ have, in recent years, become more essential on corporate websites than earlier studies had revealed. Business organisations that contribute to sustainable development must create value for the whole range of stakeholders and the natural environment beyond customers and shareholders (Schaltegger et al., 2015). Sustainable development can be especially complicated in rapidly changing business sectors, where environmental activism and new technologies challenge present business models (Kim, 2022). Torelli, Balluchi, and Lazzini (2020) point to the role of greenwashing in environmental communication, where following an environmental orientation in a sustainable manner depends on the sustainability of a company's business model and its business development results, while Pedersen, Gwozd, and Hvass (2018) concluded that companies with innovative business models in the fashion industry are more likely to address corporate sustainability as a core value.

However, not all experiments and innovations can be aligned with business, society and environmental sustainability. Innovative organisations are not automatically sustainable. Corporate sustainability researchers have highlighted characteristics of organisations that support sustainability, including creativity, open communications inside an organisation and with external partners, experimentation, teamwork and learning (Mitchell & Walinga, 2017; Sengers et al., 2019). In their research of a sample of 773 European companies, Calza et al. (2021) demonstrated that external sources of knowledge and collaboration with business partners are important ways to foster corporate environmental proactivity.

Espoused values are sanctioned by top managers and influenced by business culture (Zander et al., 2016), although despite increasing cooperation between countries and corporate ambitions to attract foreign investors, cultural differences that affect value statements remain evident. Donker et al. (2008) found that integrity, responsibility and trust to be corporate values frequently mentioned by Canadian companies. Geysi, Türkel, and Uzunoğlu (2020) compared the corporate values of companies in Turkey and the USA, revealing several common values shared by both countries, including customer focus and honesty, while noting that Turkish companies espoused more values of developing countries (e.g. development orientation), whereas US companies reflect post-materialistic values (e.g. being respectfulness). Asian and European companies more often than North American companies emphasised values related to the corporation’s broader role in society, such as social and environmental responsibility (Kelly et al., 2005). However, from their research on the largest U.S. and Chinese corporations, Cardona, Malbašić and Rey (2018) conclude that espoused values of organisations challenge some culturally rooted values that managers perceive as restrictions to organisational performance.

In Poland, research on corporate values was conducted by Stankiewicz and Moczulska (2013), Górniak (2016), Dąbrowski (2018), and Jastrzębska (2020). Stankiewicz and Moczulska (2013) studied sixty non-listed companies in the Lubuskie Voivodeship in Poland, finding the most frequently declared values to include cooperation, responsibility, quality of work and fairness, honesty, and trustworthiness. Górniak (2016) researched preferred organisational values in the context of employee engagement. The study group consisted of 551 working part-time and postgraduate students aged 22-35, employed in various sectors of the economy, and showed the most frequently declared values as responsibility, trust and cooperation. In Dąbrowski’s (2018) research on one hundred and forty listed companies, the most frequently mentioned values were responsibility, honesty, innovation, customer, respect, professionalism and trust, with the research also identifying a link between the corporate value system and its size. Jastrzębska (2020) studied 72 companies not listed in the Ranking of Responsible Companies 2019, with the most frequently declared values being responsibility, honesty, cooperation, respect, customer orientation, and openness. The most research on this topic was conducted by Kowalik (2021), parallel to the other authors. In Kowalik’s research, the values most often declared by the surveyed companies were responsibility, respect, honesty, cooperation, client-centricity and passion, although he only focused on the top 100 companies of the Forbes ranking, not on companies listed on the stock exchange.

The values of Finnish family firms with continuity over 100 years and still entrepreneurially active were studied by Koiranen (2002), who identified the most frequently used family business values as honesty, credibility, compliance with the law, quality, and hard work, while Sakyi-Gyinae and Holmlund (2018) studied value propositions in the servitisation context. For customers of a Finnish company combining hardware and software, the most important value proposition elements were system, infrastructure, integration, usage, relationship, and price. Lämsä et al. (2019) found that values guiding the recruitment of employees with a foreign background in rural areas of Finland relate to economic success, competitiveness and growth. Corporate sustainability reporting as an important context of corporate value statements was recently studied in three large-scale Finnish companies representing the energy, grocery, and pulp and paper sectors (Mikkilä et al., 2021).

In Estonia, the importance of corporate values is explained in the context of more strategically developing business ethics and CRS (Kooskora, 2015). An international comparative study by Lang and Rybnikova (2019) on value preferences related to critical managerial decisions indicated the orientation of Estonian managers on shareholder, employee and community related values.

Despite earlier studies of different aspects of values in management and business, there is a research gap in understanding how environment-focused and sustainability-focused values are connected to innovation and other values espoused by companies on their websites, and how such values influence investors’ perceptions of a company’s future prospects reflected in the price-to-earnings per share (P/E) ratio. Higher expected company stock value growth and sustainable reinvestment capacity translate into higher P/E multiples for potential investors. Environmental care and socially responsible investments can reshape the risk profile and long‑run cash‑flow trajectory of a company - through lower regulatory risk and improved stakeholder relations – provided that investors perceive these strategies as credible (Albuquerque et al., 2019; Friede et al., 2015).

Hypothesis 3. Companies that, in their espoused values, combine innovation with social responsibility and environment-related values have higher P/E ratios than companies that do not espouse such a combination.

It is essential to determine whether listed companies in converging economies, such as Poland and Estonia, differ in this context from those in Finland, which is a more advanced and knowledge-based market economy. To fill in this research gap, the authors of the present paper collected data of companies listed on the Warsaw, Helsinki and Tallinn stock exchanges during the pandemic period.

Research Methodology

Our research focuses on European Union member states representing Eastern and Northern Europe.

On 1^st January 2021, the population was 37.8 million in Poland, 5.5 million in Finland, and only 1.3 million in Estonia (Eurostat, 2022a ). In 2021, GDP in Poland stood at 583 billion euros, at 248.7 billion euros in Finland and 31.4 billion euros in Estonia (Eurostat, 2022b). At the same time, the stock market capitalisation in December 2021 on the Helsinki stock exchange accounted for 150% of Finnish nominal GDP, on the Warsaw stock exchange for 30.0% of Polish nominal GDP, and on the Tallinn stock exchange for 15% of Estonian nominal GDP (CEIC Data, 2022). Warsaw is the largest and most liquid market in Central and Eastern Europe, while Tallinn is comparatively small, with thinner trading and a narrower domestic investor base. The Helsinki stock exchange is an adaptive part of the Nordic ecosystem linked to global institutional capital (Rönkkö et al., 2024). The authors assumed that in Finland, as a more advanced knowledge-based but at the same time relatively small market economy, companies listed on the stock exchange would signal to shareholders their innovative and environment-friendly values to finance their international growth ambitions. However, all the companies listed on the stock exchanges of these three countries operate under the influence of European Union sustainability reporting regulations (Hummel & Jobst, 2024).

The study consisted of an analysis of selected content extracted from internet websites, with the information linked to profiles of companies in publicly available stock market databases, including the company's business sector, size, and P/E ratios. The data was collected from the websites of the three hundred companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, 145 from the Helsinki Stock Exchange, and 18 from the Tallinn Stock Exchange, meaning that all the companies listed on these stock exchanges were studied. Bourne, Jenkins, and Parry (2019) mapped the organisational values declared on websites from the U.K. and the U.S., based on which they created value categories, including convergent or similar values. The same method was used by the authors of the study. Originally, 134 values of Polish and 121 values of Estonian and Finnish companies were identified.

All the website sections were analysed to identify the declared values, with the studies finding that most of the values were published in the following sections: about us, social business responsibility (sustainable development) and career, while companies less frequently publish information on values in the following sections: investor relations, code of ethics, code of conduct. The studies showed that if companies did not publish information on values on their own websites, then such information was also not published anywhere else.

Only the main descriptions of the values, and not detailed explanations of how companies pursue them, were the subject of the analysis. Similar value formulations were subject to unification for further analysis. The study grouped values into eight categories, derived from the application of the Delphi method using three independent coders, with values grouped into the following categories: client, cooperation, development, employee, ethics and social responsibility, innovation, respect, and responsibility for the environment.

The data were collected between 10.03.2021 and 10.10.2021.

Data Characteristics and Empirical Results

Companies disclose a variety of values on their websites. The percentage of companies reporting values from each category is presented in Table 1. Distinct national patterns are evident: in Estonia, most companies (58%) indicate innovation as a key value in their development, the percentage of companies that marked this category in Finland is 43%, while in Poland it is just over 1/3 of companies (36%). In Finland, more emphasis is placed on responsibility for the environment (54%) and cooperation (52%), with a higher percentage of companies in Finland sharing ethics and social responsibility values compared to those in Poland and Estonia (34% vs. 20%). The same applies for environmental responsibility: only 40% of companies in Poland and Estonia identify with these values, compared to 54% in Finland.

By contrast, in Poland the percentage of companies espousing values in any category is below 50%. Besides responsibility for the environment (41%), development (39%) and employee (38%) are also ranked relatively high.

Table 1
Distribution of Companies Reporting Values by Category and Country

Source: authors' own work.

The category choice itself is not as important as the analysis of the co-occurrence of the selected values. The percentage of companies that share values from different categories is shown in Table 2, with the percentage of companies that chose only one of the categories also marked. Cooperation is the category most frequently combined with other categories, chosen together with other categories by 10 to 18% of companies. For none of the pairs does the percentage of companies exceed 18%, which means a reasonably large dispersion among the preferences of companies, and relatively few companies decided to choose only one category. Typically, the percentage of such companies oscillates between 0-2%, with an exception being the responsibility for the environment category, which was the only one chosen by almost 7%.

Table 2
Percentage of Companies Sharing Pairs of Values Across Categories

Source: authors' own work.

One of the key goals of the analysis is to verify how the values recognised by companies translate into their positive stock market prospect measured by the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. A high P/E ratio reflects the readiness of investors to pay a relatively high price for company shares compared to the retained earnings that the company has so far had per share, and if investors are willing to buy shares of companies with a high P/E ratio, they believe the company has more favourable future growth and profitability prospects than its current situation. The average P/E ratio for the entire sample is 13.8, although it varies by country. For Finland and Estonia, average P/E ratios are pretty similar, standing at 18.0 and 18.2, respectively. However, for Poland the average P/E ratio is only 12.3, which is significantly less than the other two countries.

There are no statistically significant differences between the P/E ratio of companies that recognise the ethics and social responsibility values and those that did not mark them on their websites, considering both the averages (Mann-Whitney test, p-value = 0.43) and medians (asymptotic Two-Sample Brown-Mood Median Test, p-value = 0.49). It is also true for responsibility for environmental values (averages: p-value = 0.29; medians: p-value = 0.53).

There are only two categories with statistically significant differences (at a significance level of 0.05) regarding averages and medians of the P/E ratio, with the results suggesting that companies that value innovation and respect generally achieve better stock market recognition (measured by the P/E ratio). For example, the average P/E ratio of innovative companies is 17.16 and is much higher than P/E ratio calculated for groups of non-innovative companies, which is only 11.73. The same stands if we compare medians instead of averages (11.06 vs 7.05). For other categories, the differences in probability distributions turned out to be statistically insignificant. A list of comparisons for all categories is given in Table 3.

The same conclusions can be drawn from comparing the means and medians of P/E ratios, where the spread of P/E ratio values among companies is relatively high. It is better to compare medians, so that the interpretation covers the majority of companies and no outliers influence the results.

Table 3
Comparison of Average and Median P/E Ratios of Companies That Share Versus Do Not Share Values from a Particular Category

Note. Differences that turned out to be statistically significant are bolded.
Source: authors' own work.

Between the majority of value categories and business sectors, there are no statistically significant differences in P/E ratios, although companies that value innovation and respect have higher P/E ratios than those that do not share those values (the average P/E ratio is 17.2 vs 11.7 in the innovation category, and 20.5 vs 10.6 in the respect category). In the sector recognised by five as the first digit of the NAICS code (covering Information, Finance and Insurance, Real Estate and Rental and Leasing, Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services, Administrative and Support, and Waste Management and Remediation Services), a statistically significant difference between medians of companies with (41 companies, a P/E ratio of 5.7) and without (83 companies, a P/E ratio of 9.2) responsibility-for-environment values was observed at the 0.1 significance level. This difference provides evidence that stock market investors do not believe in the long-term growth and profitability potential of companies in this sector that espouse environmental care values on their websites.

Companies in Finland, on average, had higher P/E ratios than companies in Poland and Estonia, with the average P/E ratio of companies from Finland in the considered dataset at 18.01, compared to only 12.59 in the case of companies from Poland and Estonia. In Finland, the average P/E ratio increases if we restrict the sub-sample of companies to those that share ethics and social responsibility values (P/E ratio = 20.55), but in the case of Poland and Estonia the average of this sub-sample is even slightly lower (P/E ratio = 12.00) than the P/E ratio of the total sample.

In the case of responsibility for environment values and their potential connection with the P/E ratio, the situation is similar across all three countries. Compared to the average P/E ratio, the ratio for companies that espouse responsibility for environment values is lower in Finland (P/E ratio = 14.66) as well as in Poland and Estonia (P/E ratio = 9.69). However, when comparing datasets across all three countries, the choice of espoused values only has a minimal effect on the P/E ratio.

Discussion and Conclusions

Our research allows Bourne et al. (2019) to expand their conclusions about the essential role of ‘sustainability’, ‘care for the environment’, and ‘social responsibility’ on corporate websites to some extent to Polish, Finnish and Estonian listed companies. The contribution of this research on small stock markets in Eastern and Northern Europe lies in enhancing the understanding of company values and investor behaviour in markets that are less studied than the US stock markets, which is especially important in the context of growing disparities between environmental and CSR regulations in the USA and the European Union. The research also contributes to understanding the differences between former command economies and a country that has a longer financial market history, with our comparison demonstrating that in Finland alone do more than half of the listed companies espouse environment-related values on their websites. When looking for the co-occurrence of espoused values by companies in all three countries, cooperation is most often combined with innovation and respect, potentially reflecting the promise to implement innovations in a balanced way so that the interests of different stakeholders are respected in the change process. The popularity of some values identified in the present research, such as respect and cooperation, also corresponds to Kowalik’s (2021) results indicating a certain similarity between public and private companies.

Empirical results confirm hypothesis 1, demonstrating a substantially higher share of Finnish companies that espoused cooperation and responsibility for environmental values compared to Polish or Estonian companies. As anticipated, environmental responsibility is most often represented in the value statements of Finnish companies. Finland is an advanced market economy, where environmental care is supported by both customers in their purchasing decisions and by the institutional framework.

Polish companies more often espouse development as a crucial value than Estonian or Finnish companies, and despite the role of innovation-driven business development in Finland, the share of companies that espouse innovation as a key value is even higher among Estonian companies. This can be interpreted as the desire to convince investors and other stakeholders that these companies, despite their small Eastern European country of origin, have international growth prospects driven by innovative solutions. Estonian and Finnish companies often stress respect towards employees and other stakeholders, which can be explained by Nordic consensus-building and co-determination ideals.

Hypothesis 2, which stated the positive connection between espousing society and environment-related values and the high price-to-earnings ratio at stock markets, was not supported in the total sample of three countries, leading to the conclusion that stock market capitalisation growth and the interest of investors to pay high prices for company shares was, at least during the COVID-19 crisis years, not linked to an espoused commitment of companies to follow values reflecting CSR and environment care. When analysing individual countries and industry sectors, a positive association between espousing environmental responsibility and the P/E ratio is found only in the sector that includes information, finance and real estate, and waste management services. In recent years, companies in such a broad and diversified sector have been influenced by several technology trends and economic cycles that complicate the interpretation of this finding.

At the same time, the data indicated the positive connection between the P/E ratio and the espoused combination of innovation and respect values, although hypothesis 3, which assumed a combination of innovation-related values also with society and environment values as a driver of high P/E ratios, was not supported. Stock market actors interested in buying shares in Warsaw, Helsinki or Tallinn consider innovation as a value statement when assessing a company’s growth and profitability prospects. However, they were not yet ready to assess the company’s future based on a broader value combination that seeks to align innovation with environment care and adheres to a holistic corporate social responsibility framework. Stressing the sustainability impact as a value in the context of nature and society does not convince investors that such values also guarantee long-term business sustainability and stock market value growth of the company itself.

Espoused values on websites of public companies are, in addition to investors, indeed targeted to other stakeholders, including present and potential employees, customers, and business partners. These values can support public discourse about green transition strategies and implementing CSR in practice.

To sustain valuation and growth, companies should explicitly link their innovation strategies to values that reflect the environment and social responsibility, which could be more convincing for investors if companies demonstrate how sustainability drives future cash flows and risk mitigation in their value chain (Sinnig & Zetzsche, 2025). However, with the present geopolitical situation, companies that depend on U.S. markets and global investors must monitor U.S. policies that are rolling back climate rules, which can influence the World’s largest equity market.

Companies that can demonstrate to international investors how their environment and sustainability values are supported by innovation can earn a sustainability‑supported valuation premium and face a lower cost of capital, which in turn enables them to fund more R&D and scale low‑carbon innovations, creating a feedback loop between responsible strategy and growth (Albuquerque et al., 2019). Companies that declare values supporting the environment and social sustainability face the challenge of aligning these declarations with innovations that convince investors of the sustainability of their own business future.

Limitations and Future Research

A limitation of the present research is comparing countries where the stock market plays a different role due to population, economic development history and current gross domestic product differences. The samples of companies listed on three stock markets were too small for country-level and sub-industry level detailed statistical analyses that would reveal more complicated connections between espoused value combinations and the P/E of companies in different industries or in companies that have shorter or longer track records on stock markets. This paper does not incorporate market capitalisation or stock‑price performance in historical time series, but instead focuses on the collective beliefs of investors about future growth, risk, and long-term earnings potential of companies.

Future research should be devoted to changes in values over time and to verifying changes following the COVID-19 crisis. It would be good to compare values on corporate websites and the personal values of decision-makers at different stages of business development and economic cycles, and under the influence of changing EU-USA trade and investment relations. One future direction is to extend the research to other countries, allowing for more comparisons between large and small stock markets, and an expanded international sample for more detailed statistical analysis.

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