The Magazine of Corporate Responsibility

Tag Archive for ‘ESG’

Study Finds Sustainable Companies ‘Significantly Outperform’ Financially

A new study by researchers at Harvard Business School and London Business School concludes that companies which have voluntarily embraced sustainable business cultures with a substantial number of environmental and social policies “significantly outperform their counterparts over the long-term, both in terms of stock market and accounting performance.”

Proxy Voting for Sustainability

A sustainability advocate argues that it is illogical – and quite myopic – that many large institutional investors refer to shareholder resolutions on climate change and other material issues as “special interest,” “non-routine” or involving “special circumstances.” The opposite is true, she says: if companies aren’t addressing sustainability they won’t be producing long-term value for their shareholders.

Making the Case for “Shared Value” for Business and Society

Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter and his colleague Mark Kramer argue that the time has come for global businesses to adopt the principle of “shared value.” Shared value, they write, “is not social responsibility, philanthropy, or even sustainability, but a new way to achieve economic success.”

Study: Mandatory Sustainability Reporting Improves Behavior

A new working paper by researchers at the London Business School and Harvard Business School finds that requiring companies to report on their environmental, social and governance initiatives leads to broad improvement in socially responsible management practices.

Opinion: ESG Yields Profits

Factors pertaining to ESG (environmental, social and governance) issues are now included in mainstream corporate stock and bond analysis in numerous investment firms, funds and managers globally. Why? Because it provides analysts better insight into companies and a possibility of producing higher investment returns with less risk.

Social and Environmental Shareholder Proposals Gain Traction

Shareholder proposals on social and environmental issues constitute about half of all resolutions in the 2011 proxy season and have become a serious strategic consideration for corporate boards and their members, according to a new report from the consulting firm Ernst & Young. “The degree of support for these types of resolutions is growing among mutual funds and other important investors,” the report finds.

Large U.S. Company Boards Monitor Corporate Responsibility

Boards of directors of a majority of large U.S. corporations now have committees charged with oversight of environmental and social issues, but that oversight is often not integrated into the companies’ strategic planning and operations, according to a new research study. The study also found that boards at smaller companies are far less likely to have committees charged with oversight of corporate responsibility issues.

VIDEO: Business Schools Need to Do a Better Job Teaching Values

Rich Lyons, Dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, discusses values and ethics with The Wall Street Journal.

Verbatim: How Businesses View Sustainability & CSR Reporting

Investment firm Walden Asset Management recently researched and compiled quotes from sustainability and corporate responsibility reports by several dozen companies in a wide range of industries. The exercise showed, says a Walden executive, that attention to such issues has become vitally important for a company’s business, and that transparent reporting is, as one CEO said, one of “the prices of doing business today.”

Are Business Schools to Blame for the Financial Crisis?

The director of a leading graduate education program in responsible business thinks the key to corporate responsibility is integration of sustainable thinking and action into day-to-day business as well as students’ coursework – but achieving that “represents a fundamental shift in the way companies are run and what students are taught.”