ESG Archive

US companies are continuing to ramp up ESG-related disclosures and visual presentations of board processes in their proxy statements, according to an analysis of this year’s crop. Companies have been expanding their reporting on ESG matters amid growing investor interest in those topics. Donnelley Financial Solutions’ (DFIN) report on 2019 proxy statements highlights how far that reporting has come in one of the most important tools issuers have to communicate w...

– According to The Wall Street Journal, a new Congressional bill would offer cash rewards to people who voluntarily provide original information to the PCAOB on potential audit-related violations. The bill proposes establishing a whistleblower program at the PCAOB similar to the one at the SEC. It was passed o...

Hedge fund firms expect to increase the amount they invest based on ESG factors next year, according to Iowa-based BarclayHedge. Fifty-eight percent of hedge fund assets will be tied to ESG criteria in 2020, up from 42 percent last year and the current 52 percent, BarclayHedge finds in a survey of global hedge fund managers and commodity trading advisers. ‘The increasing role of ESG ratings among the survey participants isn’t surprising,’ Sol Waksman, p...

As the integration of ESG factors into investment decision-making becomes increasingly mainstream, over-reliance on simple answers and third-party industry data, rather than assessing complexities and directly engaging with companies, could lead to smaller companies being unfairly penalized by investors on the basis of partially informed ESG criteria.  The disparity between larger and smaller companies’ disclosure of basic ESG metrics is striking and, even in dev...