ESG, Corporate Governance & Future of the Firm

Anti-ESG Legislation is Demonstrating the Peril of Meddling in Markets

Anti-ESG rhetoric from conservative states conflates valid financial evaluations of company and industry prospects with the ideological values of political opponents. Politicians that pass legislation preventing businesses and state agencies from working with financial services with ESG standards will only harm their constituents. Instead, states should encourage competition and variety in financial services, writes Jennifer J. Schulp.

Bonds Improve Institutional Investors’ Equity Monitoring

Todd Gormley and Manish Jha find that institutional investors holding bonds may experience greater investor attention and more active shareholding voting on their equity positions.

How Much Do Investors Care About Social Responsibility?

Study participants are less likely to accept lower returns in support of social goals when acting as investors versus consumers or donors with a third accepting no reduction in returns. Additionally, those with higher income, women and Democrats were willing to accept lower return in support of social goals than those with lower income, men, Republicans and Independents.

How the ‘Market Share Opportunism’ of Investment Advisers is Harming Investors and Public Companies

Investment advisors on both sides of the aisle have coopted ESG for their own exploitative marketing tactics to increase their own assets under management...

Corporate Political Responsibility in a Captured Economy

Most attention on corporate governance has focused on businesses’ social responsibility. Claudine Schneider and Ed Dolan write that businesses need to take into account...

History Shows that Voluntary ESG Standards Lead to a More Focused ESG Disclosure

In recent years, ESG reports have become more common for publicly traded companies. However, critics have found the information they provide to be inconsistent...

Investing in Influence: Investors, Portfolio Firms, and Political Giving

A new paper examines the relationship between the rising concentration in institutional investors' ownership of publicly traded U.S. firms and portfolio companies' political giving....

Twitter’s Corporate Leaders Pushed their Stakeholders under the (Musk) Bus

In a new study, we examine whether, in negotiating the sale to Elon Musk, Twitter’s corporate leaders took into account the commitments to employees...

Shareholder Democracy Doesn’t Work. Here’s How It Can.

An opinion piece by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales describes how a new voting mechanism could help individual investors persuade companies to act in...

Have Business Roundtable Companies Lived Up to Their Stakeholder Commitments?  

In 2019, more than 100 CEOs of US public companies signed a Business Roundtable statement in which they pledged to deliver value to all...

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