Background: As a transformation that is impacting not only nature but the international economy, climate change is here to stay. The demand for sustainable products has never been higher, a circumstance that should have an impact on the financial performance of a company. This paper aims to investigate whether sustainable news of a company has a positive impact on their stock price, by analyzing the Twitter tweets of the DAX30 members.
Results: The methodology used in this study includes the collection of Twitter tweets and financial information from the DAX30 members, followed by the execution of a sentiment analysis and Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis based on Python programming lanuage. The opitmal lag-length of the VAR analysis has been determinded at 18 based on the Akaike, Schwarz-Bayesian and Hannan-Quinn test. Within the predermined lag-length the VAR showed significant correlations between financial performance and twitter communication in A, b and s. The correlation coeffiecient for the significant correlations ranged from -0.777 to 0.320, proving that Twitter tweets containing sustainable sentiment have an impact on stock price performance of a company.
Conclusion: The results of the VAR analysis support the eligbility to use Twitter tweets as a benchmark for the impact of sustainability on the stock price performance of a company, as well as prooves that sustainable news can have a postive impact of a company’s market capitalization relative to its quality. Therwith, the findings of this study raise awareness of the importance of sustainability as well as show the need for a transofrmation towards a sustaibale business modell in order to ensure long term value generation.