Shareholder activism on sustainability issues has become increasingly prevalent over the years, with the number of proposals filed doubling from 1999 to 2013. We use recent innovations in accounting standard setting to classify 2,665 shareholder proposals that address environmental and social...

We examine whether ESG funds’ investment decisions are sensitive to firms’ environmental disclosures, beyond summary ESG ratings. We create our measures of environmental disclosure using bigrams extracted from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards trained against authoritative...

The ideological chasm between environmentalism and a profit driven corporate agenda at times seems insurmountable. Environmental regulation at present is highly reliant upon statutory regulation and governmental intervention whilst corporations law is based to the greatest extent possible on an...

We examine whether corporate directors learn from environmental engagements by studying the success and implementation of environmental shareholder proposals. We deem a proposal successful when the proposal sponsor withdrew it after negotiating with the target firm. Our results indicate that...