Past work finds that material self-interest often motivates increased issue engagement. In this paper we identify an important condition under which the opposite can occur. When people see an issue as threatening to harm material well-being, and they are already facing related resource...

Using a principal-agent model in which shareholders care about financial as well as environmental and social (ESG) outcomes, we provide a theoretical framework for regulating and measuring ESG outcomes. We show that when ESG cannot be reliably measured, regulators can improve ESG outcomes by...