Corporate Environmental Stewardship and Financial Performance Nexus: A Dynamic Panel Investigation of Green Investment Strategies in Vietnam's Emerging Market Context

This study investigates the complex relationship between corporate environmental stewardship and financial performance in Vietnam's emerging market context through a sophisticated examination of green investment strategies. Drawing upon an integrated theoretical framework that synthesises natural resource-based view, institutional theory, and stakeholder perspectives, the research employs a dynamic panel methodology to analyse a comprehensive dataset of 273 non-financial firms listed on Vietnamese stock exchanges from 2010 to 2016. The empirical investigation, utilising advanced econometric techniques including GMM estimation and dynamic panel threshold analysis, reveals a significant non-linear relationship between environmental investments and financial performance, with the identification of a critical threshold value of 5.2% in environmental investment intensity. The findings demonstrate that the environmental-financial performance relationship is substantially moderated by institutional development, with temporal analyses revealing progressive strengthening of this relationship over the study period. This research makes several significant contributions to existing scholarship: it extends current theoretical frameworks by developing an integrated model that explicitly accounts for institutional complexities in emerging markets, provides novel empirical insights into the temporal dynamics of environmental investment effectiveness, and identifies specific mechanisms through which environmental stewardship initiatives translate into financial outcomes. The study's findings have important implications for corporate strategic decision-making and policy development in emerging market contexts, whilst opening new trajectories for future research in environmental strategy and institutional theory.