ESG

We have seen flows into ESG funds go from roughly $5 billion to nearly $400 billion since 2015, which begs the question many have asked: what constitutes an ESG fund?

This week, Emmanuel Faber, one of the world’s foremost proponents of stakeholder capitalism, lost his job as CEO and chairman of Danone. The easy reaction would be to see this as a blow for proponents of the stakeholder cause. That would be a mistake.

This week’s chart from the Wall Street Journal explores the recent tidal wave of ESG funds and dives into the average expense ratios of U.S. equity ETFs.

More investors are recognizing that investing can serve a dual purpose – to both reach financial goals and to perpetuate core values by supporting companies doing right by all shareholders.

Yesterday, acting SEC Chair Allison Herren Lee – who at the beginning of the week had said at a conference that voluntary ESG disclosure wasn’t cutting it – announced the creation of a Climate and ESG Task Force in the Enforcement division

Companies that have invested in their workforces have been more successful than those that haven’t for the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This week, we look at Morningstar’s most recent analysis Jackie Cook, diving into the C-suite Gender Pay Gap.

With the societal and legal move towards decarbonization, utilities that emit a comparatively high amount of carbon are challenged by stranded assets and/or potentially high costs to upgrade equipment.

investors are becoming sophisticated enough to tell the difference between greenwashing and value creation…and this Exxon case proves it.

2020 was a year that exposed a simple truth – that society’s shift to stakeholder capitalism is now an urgent necessity.

We take a look at our 2021 ranked companies that had controversies across all of our various stakeholders to show that, unsurprisingly, companies with fewer controversies slightly outperform those with more.

Here are five of our most viewed ESG-focused features from 2020.

Will the social element of ESG remain on both the American public’s and professional investors’ minds as we enter 2021

Public and private sectors are locked in a constant struggle, with the pendulum swinging between regulation and taxation on the one side, and free enterprise and profits on the other. For the good of the country, this has to change.

How companies and investors can lead in building a more just and inclusive economy that works for all Americans.

As I write this, the outcome of the Presidential election is still on a razor’s edge. Whoever emerges victorious will face a divided Congress and a country riven by political discord and scarred by an electoral process that has pushed us to the limit.

We revisit a past Chart of the Week to show that the companies that support their workers continue to outperform the market.

In this week’s Chart of the Week, we take a look at the JUST Industry leaders across our universe to examine their strong outperformance in this economic recovery.

We sat down with two of the ESG’s most prominent leaders –John Goldstein, the head of the Sustainable Finance Group at Goldman Sachs and Megan Starr, the Global Head of Impact for The Carlyle Group, to discuss the future of ESG. 

Companies that support customers by producing non-harmful and quality products, emphasizing privacy, using fair pricing, offering equal treatment, and more, outperform their competitors by 20.7% .

Arguments in support of shareholder primacy and against stakeholder capitalism are out of sync with the voice of the American public, institutional investors, shareholders, and corporations themselves. 

In light of Labor Day this past Monday, we revisit a chart from early June to evaluate how companies’ treatment of their workers continues to affect financial performance throughout 2020.

For Labor Day, we revisit our Chart of the Week from earlier this summer to reevaluate how companies who fully disclose their EEO-1 reports have performed throughout the trailing three months. 

This week, we explore the risk profile of more just companies in comparison to less just ones, and show that JUST companies have less volatility.

This week, we dive into the history of our JUST Rankings and evaluate how America’s Most JUST Companies have performed on a cumulative basis since inception, finding that the top four quintiles as the top quintile has outperformed the bottom quintile by 29.9% cumulatively.