**3. Data**

governance indicators. In particular, the environmental score contains components such as "resource use" and "emissions", the social score elements such as "workforce" and "human rights", and the governance component for instance the "corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy" [24]. The point labels are the Datastream symbols for the companies (shorter than the complete company names) and the levels of ESG scores (from "Low" to "Very high") were artificially created for this study for better representation of the ESG scores. The *y*-axis is on a logarithmic scale. In general, companies with larger market capitalization tend to be associated with higher Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores. One possible explanation for this could be that the operations of larger companies might be more in the public's attention and more exposed, which may create pressure The data for this study are from the 81 constituents of the S&P Global Clean Energy Index from 1 January 2009 until 30 June 2021. The start of the time period was selected as the year 2009 since this year marks the beginning of the steps leading up to the Paris Agreement [19]. The time-series data were obtained from the Thompson Reuters "Datastream" service with daily frequency. The variables downloaded for the companies consist of target price information (from the "Institutional Brokers Estimate System" (IBES)), companyrelated information such as the stock price, and the price-earnings (PE) ratio, as well as the MSCI world index, which is a broad global equity index. A complete list of the "raw" variables (incl. symbols) downloaded from Datastream can be found in Appendix A Table A1.

from stakeholders such as society, civil organizations, as well as from (potential) investors. Additionally, larger companies might be able to allocate larger financial resources to reporting tools for ESG rating agencies (for instance, to provide higher quality and more comprehensive data to better fit the ESG measurement systems). Apart from that, it could be that the management enumeration of larger companies may be more tied to the accomplishment of ESG-based objectives, thus incentivizing a stronger focus on ESG-conform Target prices are most commonly set for the estimated stock price in 12 months [2,7]. Thus, taking an investor's perspective, only the information related to target prices from 1 January 2009 until 30 June 2020 were considered (a year shorter than the entire period) and compared with the actual stock prices after one year (1 January 2010 to 30 June 2021). This way, up to 2999 observations were available per company (less for those that did not have any target price information at certain points in time).

activities and behavior. The focus of this work is on mean target prices (consensus price target) since they represent analysts' average estimated price of a stock in the future. In order to avoid including the same target prices for a company on consecutive days, the number of observations was reduced to the initial observation of a company and each observation for which the mean target price had changed compared to the previous observation—so at least a single revision/adjustment of a stock price has taken place. This decreased the



**Table 1.** Variables and pre-processing.

Two additional variables were created: "Low Target Above Price" and "High Target Below Price". The first reflects that even the lowest target price of analysts exceeds the current stock price, highlighting a consensus that the stock may be undervalued and suggesting a possibly positive outlook for a company. The second reflects that even the highest target price provided by analysts is below the current stock price, indicating a potentially overvalued stock.

There are two separate targets for the classification that are based on the mean target price. The first target ("Year-End") is binary and reflects whether a stock's price after 12 months is as high or higher than the (initial) mean target price suggested ("1") or whether it did not reach the target price ("0"). The second target ("Year-Highest") is also binary, but represents whether the highest stock price accomplished during the entire 12-month interval is as high or higher than the initial mean target price ("1") or whether it was at no point during that year as high as the mean target price ("0"). In other words, the first target focuses exclusively on the year-end stock price whereas the second target emphasizes the largest stock price during the entire 12-month period. Using these two perspectives for the accuracy of target price was also taken in [2,7], whereas a focus on any point during the year—which is termed in this study "Year-Highest"—was pursued in [5,11].
