Academics and regulators have given significant attention to the impact of institutional investors on the companies in which they invest. Some are concerned that the institutional investors act as common owners. But in their active ownership policies institutional investors often say they are...

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...

This paper assesses whether shareholders drive the environmental and social (E&S) performance of firms worldwide. Across 41 countries, we find that institutional ownership is positively associated with E&S performance with additional tests suggesting this relation is causal. Our evidence shows...

This paper investigates the effect of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs) on corporate social responsibility (CSR) within the context of listed firms in China. We find that QFIIs offer an incisive channel for improving socially responsible practices. In addition, we find that firms...

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...

This paper assesses whether shareholders drive the environmental and social (E&S) performance of firms worldwide. Across 41 countries, institutional ownership is positively associated with E&S performance with additional tests suggests this relation is causal. Institutions are motivated by both...

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)...

Existing research and practical evidence highly question whether institutional investor truly walk the talk when it comes to fostering corporate sustainability (CS) in their investee companies, or merely engage in greenwashing. This study investigates how responsible institutional investors...