Employment quality is a key aspect of the social dimension of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria that socially conscious investors use to evaluate firms. Several data vendors have provided their own matric of corporate employment practices encompassing compensation,...

Sustainability in business and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) in finance has entered the mainstream and has generated thousands of research articles that analyze its correlation with financial performance. We surveyed 1,141 primary peer-reviewed papers and 27 meta-reviews (based on...

Do on-package sustainability claims lead to both better product performance and category growth (and thus to a better world)? We conducted a large-scale study of actual consumer purchasing behavior using IRI retail scanned barcode data at point of sale from 2013-2018. We analyzed 36 consumer...

Practitioners and researchers struggle with valuing the return on sustainability investment (ROSI). We apply a five-step methodology that systematically monetizes sustainability actions to answer a key question: Do sustainable practices lead to a positive financial return for the business? We...

In this appendix to Atz, Van Holt, Liu, and Bruno (2021), “Does Sustainability Generate Better Financial Performance? Review, Meta-analysis, and Propositions” (available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3708495), we provide additional information on how the studies were selected, coded, and...

Investing in employment quality can be beneficial for employees, corporate performance, and investor returns. We use a resilience-based quality jobs framework to assess employment quality for companies included in B Lab’s B Impact Assessment (BIA) database. The SVEF framework includes four...

In this paper, we begin by discussing concerns that existing reporting practices, including those used on quarterly earnings calls, underweight ESG disclosures and amplify short-term pressures on corporate management. We survey the broad market trends that are encouraging greater focus on ESG...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending — direct lending between lenders and borrowers online outside traditional financial intermediaries like banks — first emerged in the United Kingdom and the world with the launch of Zopa in 2005. Our paper provides a quantitative analysis of nearly 14 million loan...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) lending — direct lending between lenders and borrowers online outside traditional financial intermediaries like banks — first emerged in the United Kingdom and the world with the launch of Zopa in 2005. Our paper provides a quantitative analysis of nearly 14 million loan...