Probing the antecedents of investor green practices in South Africa
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A collage of environmental challenges in South Africa have stimulated the growing interest for greener practices. Notwithstanding the generic antecedents of green practices in the existing literature, little is known if water and energy consumption matter to investors who are going green. Thus, we seek to investigate if water and energy consumption influences investors’ green practices in South Africa. We adopt a positivist stance and employ a quantitative research approach to achieve the set objective. We draw archival data from companies that constitute the FTSE/JSE Responsible Investment Index given their environmental impact. We generate a short panel data set of 19 FTSE/JSE RII companies with a six-year period resulting in 114 observations to statistically conduct the analysis. Given stationarity of all endogenous variables at I(1), we adopt first differenced econometric models namely Panel Vector Autoregression Model (PVAR) for Random Effects Generalized Least Squares (GLS) regression and Random Effects Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) to generate more robust results generalisable to the entire population. We find a statistically significant negative effect of water and energy consumption on investor share ownership. Thus, we posit that corporate water and energy consumption may not be the primary antecedents of investors’ sustainability practices in South Africa. This paper agitates for future research studies to pursue the same enquiry using sustainability variables other than water and energy consumption.