We propose a novel way of measuring the equity portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of a 13F institution (the “sustainability footprint”) and examine the relation between sustainability footprints and risk-adjusted investment performance. The analysis shows that 13F...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...

We conduct an experiment assessing the extent to which people trade off the economic costs of truthfulness against the intrinsic costs of lying. The results allow us to reject a type-based model. People's preferences for truthfulness do not identify them as only either quot;economic typesquot;...

Social norms can act as safeguards against corporate misconduct, but can also foster undesirable behavior. To study differences in individual resistance to social norms, we conduct a laboratory experiment on misrepresentation of earnings. There are systematic differences among individuals'...

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are the main tool for asset managers in designing and implementing ESG investment strategies. They amalgamate a broad range of fundamentally different factors, creating ambiguity for investors as to the signals of higher or lower ESG scores. We...

How do changes in Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scores influence banks’ systemic risk contribution? We document a beneficial impact of the ESG Combined Score and Governance pillar on banks’ contribution to system-wide distress analysing a panel of 367 publicly listed banks from...

This paper evaluates the impact of a screening process based on Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores for an otherwise passive portfolio of investment-grade corporate bonds. The main result is that this filtering leads to a substantial improvement of the targeted ESG score without...

We investigate how sell-side analysts adjust their earnings forecasts following ESG incidents. We find that following negative ESG news, analysts significantly downgrade their earnings forecasts at all horizons, including long-term. Forecast revisions account for all the negative impact of ESG...

This paper studies the development of a firm’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance following the issuance of “green loans” earmarked for green projects versus “sustainable loans” to firms bench-marked by ESG criteria. Firms issuing green loans appear to be effective...

We explore a novel survey on responsible investing by institutional investors around the world and match it to archival data on their equity portfolio holdings. We document that institutions that publicly commit to responsible investing exhibit better environmental, social, and governance (ESG)...