ESG investing is long past the point where it simply excluded some companies. Today, engagement with management is the name of the game. But does engagement work? Vicente Bermejo and his colleagues tried to figure out what influence investors have on the ESG practices of companies and compare this to the influence of the company itself and the CEO of the company. This is much harder than it sounds because you need to have a complete dataset of companies, their CEOs, and their entire investor base plus the shareholder votes at AGMs on ESG issues. Stating with the companies in the US covered by MSCI ESG, they collected this data for some 5,300 companies with some 7,700 CEOs and some 7,500 large institutional investors between 1992 and 2018.
The whole concept of "stakeholder" is really anathema to private property. It is the group of people that want to use someone else's balance sheet for their political agendas. Fine to have political agendas, but if people really care about them, then they should pay themselves.
The whole concept of "stakeholder" is really anathema to private property. It is the group of people that want to use someone else's balance sheet for their political agendas. Fine to have political agendas, but if people really care about them, then they should pay themselves.