Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) signals are an important part of factor-based investing strategies as they can stem from the same economic rationales as general factor premiums. Because factors are broad and diversified, building portfolios by jointly optimizing factor exposures with...

The idea behind the optimal ESG portfolio (OESGP) is to expand the mean variance theory by adding the portfolio ESG value (PESGV) multiplied by the ESG strength parameter γ (which is investor’s choice) to the minimizing objective function (Pederson et al., 2019; Schmidt, 2020). PESGV is assumed...

The literature on the relationship between ESG disclosure and economic growth is relatively non-existent. Thus, this paper highlights the importance of taking this relationship into account in current sustainable policies. The main objective of extra-financial Disclosure is to mitigate...

Objective: The objective of the article is to explore and assess whether the SFDR legal framework creates a legitimate, effective, and efficient mechanism that supports a genuinely sustainable investment and eliminates greenwashing and other trade-offs. It targets the Regulation (EU) 2019/2088...

Responding to increasingly degrading environmental and social conditions, the European Commission has undertaken important legal and regulatory reforms to promote sustainable finance policy in Europe. However, these reforms have been numerous, complex, and fast-paced. They have proved difficult...

This paper uses the study of two ESG data vendors – KLD and Innovest – to exemplify the “social origins of ESG” argument made by Eccles and Stroehle (2018). Based on in-depth interviews with the organizations' founders and historical document analysis, we recap the history of the cases...

This paper analyzes the asset pricing and portfolio implications of an important barrier to sustainable investing---uncertainty about the corporate ESG profile. In equilibrium, the market premium increases and demand for stocks declines under ESG uncertainty. In addition, the CAPM alpha and...

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 studies the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings on investors' preferences and stock prices. We exploit a change in ESG rating methodology that non-linearly shifted ESG ratings for firms as a natural experiment. We show that the 'pseudo'-changes in the ESG...

We study the design features of disclosure regulations that seek to trigger the green transition of the global economy and ask whether such regulatory interventions are likely to bring about sufficient market discipline to achieve socially optimal climate targets. We categorize the transparency...