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This study investigates the effect of corporate social and environmental evaluation on investors' risk perception to explore the potential market risk for public companies that adopt a sustainable and responsible corporate strategy. We referred to the triple corporate assessment according to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria to check whether ESG factors-meant to direct firms toward social and environmental needs-improve corporate market performance or trigger, among investors, a perception of "window dressing." In doing so, we tested the impact of corporate social performance-proxied by an ESG assessment-on corporate financial risk using double risk measurement. We conducted a five-year longitudinal study (fiscal years 2014-2018) of 222 companies listed on the Standard & Poor's index. The empirical findings show higher investor uncertainty regarding corporate sustainability performance, probably due to the misalignment of objectives between investors and investees. Indeed, an overall ESG assessment corresponds to higher systematic risk for firms, and a corporate environmental rating has an upward effect on the same risk dimension.

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Regarding the development of sustainable governance systems, many regulators have issued and developed self-regulatory codes defining the characteristics and ideal features of government models. The adoption of codes of good governance could serve as a mechanism to increase the level of legal protection for minority shareholders.Thus, this paper aims to measure the effective compliance by Italian listed companies with the Italian Code's recommendations on related party transactions and to assess the level of legal protection for minority shareholders in the Italian stock market.Using a quantitative method, our findings suggest that FTSE MIB companies are effectively compliant and that public utilities companies are as well. We also carried out an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and found that companies with a higher market value and a greater presence of independent and non-executive directors assure a higher level of compliance. We observed that widely held firms have a positive effect on the level of legal protection for the minority shareholders. Our paper contributes to enriching the sustainable governance models, and it is directed to academic and practical communities.