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1.
This article by the former chairman of the FASB and the founder and executive director of the new Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) presents the rationale for and mission of the SASB. As the authors point out, both the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was created in 1934, and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, set up in 1973, emerged during times of low investor confidence to restore trust in the capital markets. And the institutional changes brought about by the creation of both the SEC and the FASB succeeded in eliciting new information for investors and in raising the standards by which such information was reported. But as the authors go on to argue, we now live in a different world, one in which the management of environmental, social, and governance issues is increasingly viewed as critical to the long‐run value creation of companies. And because today's corporate reporting fails to account in a systematic way for material non‐financial issues, it's time once again for the capital markets to evolve. The SASB aims to meet this need by creating sustainability accounting standards for use by public companies in disclosing a minimum set of material sustainability impacts for companies in over 80 different industries. As part of a natural evolution in disclosure, the SASB aims to achieve the same goal the SEC and FASB started with: to protect investors and the public.  相似文献   

2.
Early research into the relationship between corporate sustainability programs and financial performance suggests a positive relationship between strong sustainability performance and a lower cost of capital. As investors increasingly incorporate sustainability information into financial decisionmaking, the importance of high‐quality sustainability disclosure is growing. Just as investors have relied on financial disclosures based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) to assess corporate risk, a market standard is needed to help companies disclose comparable sustainability information. To address this issue, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) conducted a recent analysis of the current state of sustainability disclosure in annual Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings. The study reviewed the disclosures of over 700 U.S.‐and foreign‐domiciled companies, focusing on material sustainability topics as identified by SASB's industry‐specific accounting standards. The authors find large variations among different corporate sectors in the frequency and quality, as well as the focus, of their sustainability disclosures. Then, after examining in detail disclosures within the SASB Resource Transformation and Consumer Staples sectors, the authors suggest a number of possible drivers of this variation, including key sustainability and economic trends, while also presenting evidence of increasing investor interest in sustainability information. Although the authors' analysis was not intended to determine the extent to which the quality of sustainability disclosure affects investor returns, the findings provide a useful baseline for the as yet largely unexplored relationship between sustainability disclosure and corporate financial performance.  相似文献   

3.
In this discussion that took place at the SASB 2016 Symposium, the former Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission explores recent developments in corporate sustainability reporting with three Directors—two past and one current—of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance (or “CorpFin”). The consensus of the panelists was that investors want companies to provide more and better disclosure of their ESG exposures, particularly climate change, and their plans to manage those exposures. According to the current director of CorpFin, the most common demand expressed in the thousands of “comment letters” elicited by the SEC's recent concept release was for more and better sustainability information. And among the many issues cited by investors in those letters, including economic inequality, corruption, indigenous rights, and community relations, the subject of greatest interest by far was climate change. While none of the panelists claimed to see private‐sector demand for SEC action and a new set of mandatory requirements, all seemed to agree that many companies would welcome the establishment of voluntary guidelines and standards for providing ESG information—and that the guidelines recently developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board are a promising model. For companies in each of 79 different industries, the SASB has identified a specific set of “material” concerns along with metrics or KPIs that can be used to evaluate corporate performance in responding to those concerns. Perhaps the most important advantage of this approach is that, by limiting such reporting to material exposures (and so adhering to a principle that has long informed SEC requirements), the SASB guidelines should significantly increase the relevance and value to investors—while possibly holding down the costs—of the sustainability reports that large companies in the U.S. and abroad have been producing for decades. But, as the former SEC Chair also notes in closing, the adoption of such guidelines by companies should be viewed as just a first step toward improving disclosure. To help companies develop the most useful and cost‐effective disclosure practices, investors themselves will have to become more active in communicating their own demands and preferences for information.  相似文献   

4.
The market continues to show growing interest in how well companies are performing across a broad range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions. Partly as a result, the companies themselves are paying more attention to these performance dimensions, how they contribute to financial performance, and how to evaluate tradeoffs that arise. One of the greatest challenges facing both investors and companies in using ESG performance information is the absence of standards. Another challenge is knowing which of the many ESG dimensions are most material for a company in terms of creating value for shareholders and stakeholders over the long term. The authors argue that materiality and reporting standards must be developed on a sector‐by‐sector basis, and that failure to do so will result in inconsistent and even misleading disclosures. The authors illustrate this with the case of climate change. The SEC has already issued interpretive guidance on climate change disclosures, making it quite clear that existing regulations require companies to report on material effects of climate change, from both an upside and downside perspective. Based on an analysis of 10K filings in six industries, the authors show that, even within a given industry, there is substantial variation in reporting among companies that ranges from no disclosure, to boilerplate disclosure, industry‐specific interpretation, and the use of quantitative metrics. After providing further detail on this by looking at the airline and utilities industries, the authors conclude by offering a methodology for defining material ESG issues on a sector‐by‐sector basis that could provide the basis for developing key performance indicators.  相似文献   

5.
With enterprise values now representing increasing multiples of companies' net book assets, investors are clearly looking beyond financial reporting for enhanced insights and understanding of when and how companies are adding value. This shift includes growing attention to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information. Although ESG data presents its own unique challenges, dismissing it as “non‐financial” can be misleading. When explicitly linked to a company's long‐term value creation strategy, ESG information can serve as a valuable input to more farsighted financial analysis. Market‐driven initiatives, notably that of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), aim to standardize a subset of business‐critical, industry‐specific sustainability data for investors. Research indicates such approaches can generate positive outcomes not only for providers of financial capital, but for their portfolio companies and markets in general. In illustrating these concepts, the authors explore ESG impacts in three sectors and industries, while examining how access to consistent, comparable, reliable sustainability information in those sectors can augment an analysis of traditional business fundamentals. One example focuses on water management in the Oil & Gas Exploration & Production industry, a major environmental issue where geographic considerations can shed light on company‐specific exposures to cost increases, production disruptions, increased CapEx and R&D spending, as well as the potential for asset write‐downs. In the Food & Beverage sector, health and nutrition concerns are shown to be changing consumer preferences, triggering regulatory action, and reshaping companies' product portfolios—with significant implications for the companies' brand values and ability to compete for market share. Finally, in Aerospace & Defense, lapses in business ethics such as bribery of government officials present a governance challenge that comes with the risk of value‐destroying fines and penalties and, even more significant, associated reductions in revenues.  相似文献   

6.
At the end of 2018, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) released its corporate reporting standards for material environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues. These SASB standards are analogous to FASB's but deal with ESG activities that help the companies create value over the long term and have been endorsed by large asset management firms such as BlackRock. The authors analyze the quality of ESG reporting by the 91 companies that adopted SASB's framework. While the number of such companies is still small, their results are encouraging, an indication of better things to come. Using three measures of effectiveness, Disclosure Topic Compliance Index (DTCI), Financial Relevance Compliance Index (FRCI), and Financial Intensity Compliance Index (FICI), the authors found that most companies are doing a good to very good job of reporting and companies tend to focus on measures with the highest financial relevance. Scores on these three measures were similar across industry sectors except for a few cases where the DTCI score is low. They presented cases of three SASB standard companies: 1) Sunrun, a residential solar panel company that uses some hazardous materials, 2) Suncor, an integrated oil and gas company, and 3) Target, a retail company in a highly competitive industry needing to keep costs low while also managing an extensive supply chain responsibly. These 91 companies have demonstrated that reporting according to SASB standards can be done well. This success should encourage other companies to follow and the authors offer a seven‐step process to adopt SASB standards.  相似文献   

7.
8.
In this third of the three discussions that took place at the SASB 2016 Symposium, practitioners of a broad range of investment approaches—active as well as passive in both equities and fixed‐income—explain how and why they use ESG information when evaluating companies and making their investment decisions. There was general agreement that successful ESG investing depends on integrating ESG factors with the methods and data of traditional “fundamental” financial statement analysis. And in support of this claim, a number of the panelists noted that some of the world's best “business value investors,” including Warren Buffett, have long incorporated environmental, social, and governance considerations into their investment decision‐making. In the analysis of such active fundamental investors, ESG concerns tend to show up as risk factors that can translate into higher costs of capital and lower values. And companies' effectiveness in managing such factors, as ref lected in high ESG scores and rankings, is viewed by many fundamental investors as an indicator of management “quality,” a reliable demonstration of the corporate commitment to investing in the company's future. Moreover, some fixed‐income investors are equally if not more concerned than equity investors about ESG exposures. ESG factors can have pronounced effects on performance by generating “tail risks” that can materialize in both going‐concern and default scenarios. And the rating agencies have long attempted to reflect some of these risks in their analysis, though with mixed success. What is relatively new, however, is the frequency with which fixed income investors are engaging companies on ESG topics. And even large institutional investors with heavily indexed portfolios have become more aggressive in engaging their portfolio companies on ESG issues. Although the traditional ESG filters used by such investors were designed mainly just to screen out tobacco, firearms, and other “sin” shares from equity portfolios, investors' interest in “tilting” their portfolios toward positive sustainability factors, in the form of lowcarbon and gender‐balanced ETFs and other kinds of “smart beta” portfolios, has gained considerable momentum.  相似文献   

9.
The authors present persuasive evidence that board leadership is essential for solving critical sustainability issues like climate change. As fiduciaries to investors and stewards of a company's performance and success, corporate directors have a critical role to play in providing oversight of material risks to corporate strategy and performance, especially those posed by climate change. Drawing upon a report by Ceres and KKS Advisors, the authors show that perhaps most important among best practices for companies intent on establishing effective board governance are the creation of formal board mandates for sustainability, the recruitment of directors with sustainability expertise, and the linking of executive pay to sustainability performance. The authors' study also provides compelling evidence that when companies put in place such governance features, their sustainability performance improves notably. The international banking group BNP Paribas and the electric utility Iberdrola are held up as illustrations of governance systems that are likely to be effective in helping companies respond to climate change.  相似文献   

10.
Stock exchanges are in a unique position to promote ESG transparency and leverage their institutional capacity to build more sustainable capital markets. To facilitate the quick uptake of material ESG disclosure and raise the quality and comparability of the data, the Athens Stock Exchange has created ESG guidelines for listed companies that will be published in the summer of 2019. One important feature of the guidelines is their degree of sectoral specificity and emphasis on materiality. The guidelines and supporting metrics they propose are based on reporting practices endorsed by international sustainability standards like the SASB's industry standards. This materiality‐oriented approach will help issuers focus on the sustainability value drivers inherent in their business, and so ensure that corporate ESG disclosures satisfy the demand of investors for comparable quantitative and accounting metrics that help companies communicate their commitment to long‐term value creation.  相似文献   

11.
Even though most large corporations view sustainability considerations and concerns as having the potential to affect their revenue and profits, and studies have shown that sustainability can affect stock returns, investors and corporate managers continue to struggle to incorporate such concerns into their financial decision‐making. As a consequence, the valuation effects of sustainability issues are not fully reflected in either the valuation of companies by investors or in capital investment decisions by corporate managers. The author argues that sustainability can be integrated into both of these kinds of financial decision‐making by linking it to business models, competitive positions, and value drivers using what the author calls a “value‐driver adjustment” (VDA) approach. The basic idea is simple: material sustainability issues affect business models and competitive positions, which in turn affect the company's value drivers—notably, sales, margins, and capital. The VDA approach explicitly considers these linkages by taking three steps: (1) identifying a company's material sustainability issues; (2) analyzing how these issues are expected to affect the company's business model and competitive position; and (3) quantifying the effects of such changes in business model and competitive position on the company's value drivers, including its cost of capital. In the first part of the article, the author provides an investor perspective that shows how sustainability can be integrated into investment decisions by asset managers. There he explains how and why ESG integration has so far failed to become mainstream, and what needs to be done to make it successful. The second part of this article takes the corporate perspective and shows how sustainability can be linked to value drivers using much the same ingredients as in asset management, but slightly different tools that can help corporate managers incorporate sustainability concerns into strategy and operations, including the finance function. And in closing, the author brings together corporate and investor perspectives while showing how sustainability programs can be used to make the relationship between companies and their shareholders both stronger and longer‐lasting.  相似文献   

12.
There is a clear trend in corporate governance toward increased attention to the environmental and social impacts of business operations. Major consulting firms are advising Fortune 500 companies on how to become more environmentally sustainable, private equity and “impact” investors are measuring environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, and voluntary reporting and shareholder resolutions on issues of environmental sustainability are on the rise. While traditional corporate forms allow companies to embrace social and environmental responsibility with some measure of success, various real and perceived risks encourage directors to focus on short‐term profitability. Even if a company has a strong social mission at inception, founders often have difficulty “anchoring their mission” over time. And the lack of required disclosure of social and environmental performance makes it more difficult for investors to evaluate and compare companies. Many believe that the institutionalized mispricing of natural resources and the continued failure to price externalities, combined with the progressive nature of climate change, require the transformation of both business and law. This article discusses social and environmental sustainability within the traditional corporate form and then explores three emerging alternatives that are now being used by businesses in California: limited liability corporations (LLCs); benefit corporations (B corps); and flexible purpose corporations (FPCs). Of these three alternatives, FPCs—a corporate form that requires shareholders to agree on one or more social missions with management and the board—may be best suited to meet the needs of the many small private firms (as well as some large public companies) that, whether for purely economic or altruistic reasons, plan to integrate ESG into their operations.  相似文献   

13.
The authors discuss the benefits of considering material environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors when investing in emerging and frontier markets. Companies that operate in these markets face a myriad of operating challenges, and management teams that respond to such challenges effectively can achieve superior financial performance over time. They are able to grow faster, achieve higher profitability, reduce their cost of capital, and manage exogenous risks better than their peers. For investment managers, integrating sustainability into the analysis process provides a differentiated lens to identify companies that possess strong competitive advantages that can drive value creation over time. At the same time, it can help investment managers avoid companies that have embedded risks in their business model or operations that may not be entirely visible to the market. Finally, given the early‐stage nature of many of these markets and the sometimes uneven understanding of sustainability issues at a company level, the authors argue that active ownership can be an important driver of alpha generation by fund managers. Engaging constructively with board members and management teams to improve a company's ESG profile can help drive operational improvements, strengthen the risk management function, and upgrade investors’ perception of the quality of the management team.  相似文献   

14.
The number of public companies reporting ESG information grew from fewer than 20 in the early 1990s to 8,500 by 2014. Moreover, by the end of 2014, over 1,400 institutional investors that manage some $60 trillion in assets had signed the UN Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI). Nevertheless, companies with high ESG “scores” have continued to be viewed by mainstream investors as unlikely to produce competitive shareholder returns, in part because of the findings of older studies showing low returns from the social responsibility investing of the 1990s. But studies of more recent periods suggest that companies with significant ESG programs have actually outperformed their competitors in a number of important ways. The authors’ aim in this article is to set the record straight on the financial performance of sustainable investing while also correcting a number of other widespread misconceptions about this rapidly growing set of principles and methods: Myth Number 1: ESG programs reduce returns on capital and long‐run shareholder value. Reality: Companies committed to ESG are finding competitive advantages in product, labor, and capital markets; and portfolios that have integrated “material” ESG metrics have provided average returns to their investors that are superior to those of conventional portfolios, while exhibiting lower risk. Myth Number 2: ESG is already well integrated into mainstream investment management. Reality: The UNPRI signatories have committed themselves only to adhering to a set of principles for responsible investment, a standard that falls well short of integrating ESG considerations into their investment decisions. Myth Number 3: Companies cannot influence the kind of shareholders who buy their shares, and corporate managers must often sacrifice sustainability goals to meet the quarterly earnings targets of increasingly short‐term‐oriented investors. Reality: Companies that pursue major sustainability initiatives, and publicize them in integrated reports and other communications with investors, have also generally succeeded in attracting disproportionate numbers of longer‐term shareholders. Myth Number 4: ESG data for fundamental analysis is scarce and unreliable. Reality: Thanks to the efforts of reporting and investor organizations such as SASB and Ceres, and of CDP data providers like Bloomberg and MSCI, much more “value‐relevant” ESG data on companies has become available in the past ten years. Myth Number 5: ESG adds value almost entirely by limiting risks. Reality: Along with lower risk and a lower cost of capital, companies with high ESG scores have also experienced increases in operating efficiency and expansions into new markets. Myth Number 6: Consideration of ESG factors might create a conflict with fiduciary duty for some investors. Reality: Many ESG factors have been shown to have positive correlations with corporate financial performance and value, prompting ERISA in 2015 to reverse its earlier instructions to pension funds about the legitimacy of taking account of “non‐financial” considerations when investing in companies.  相似文献   

15.
This paper examines the participation of accounting firms in the development of sustainability standards by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). This study shows that the Big Four accounting firms have an active role in both the submission of comment letters on sustainability to the SEC and participation in the industry working groups (IWG) for the SASB. The SASB participation reveals that individuals located within the US and at international affiliates are participating at earlier career stages. In addition, this paper leverages LinkedIn data, identifying the career path of the individuals subsequent to their participation with the IWG, to determine how large accounting firms are retaining the skills and knowledge necessary for this field. Since the Big Four firms are market leaders in sustainability assurance, the finding that Big Four firms can retain individuals with financial assurance backgrounds differently than individuals with other backgrounds speaks to the unique skill set that financial assurance develops. This suggests that the career opportunities for interested financial assurance individuals within the sustainability sphere remain robust within the Big Four environment.  相似文献   

16.
The authors review the findings of their global survey of 582 institutional investors that were either practicing or planning to practice some degree of integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into their investment decision‐making process. The investors were evenly split between asset owners and asset managers, equity and fixed income, and across the three regions of the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. The survey explored reasons for ESG investing; the barriers to such investing and investor approaches to overcoming them; and the time frames used for making investment decisions, evaluating the performance of managers, and awarding compensation. The authors report finding that the commonly perceived barriers to ESG integration—the belief that ESG integration requires sacrificing returns, that fiduciary duty prevents one from doing so, and unrealistically short‐term expectations for ESG to deliver outperformance—were not as great as commonly believed. The biggest barrier is the lack of high quality data about the performance of companies on their material ESG factors—a scarcity that the authors attribute to the lack of standards for measuring ESG performance and the lack of ESG performance data reported by companies. The results were very similar between asset owners and asset managers, equity and fixed income, and across regions. However, the investment horizons of asset owners were notably longer than those of asset managers, and the same was true of equity vs. fixed income investors. Investors in the Americas were more patient about time frames for seeing outperformance from ESG, while those in Asia Pacific were the least patient. There were also differences across regions in how to overcome the barriers to ESG integration.  相似文献   

17.
This article discusses the rise of intangibles‐intensive companies and private equity (PE) since the late 1970s, and the role of both in bringing about the creation of a streamlined, more flexible set of accounting rules that, since their approval by the IASB and FASB in 2009, have been used by private companies and their investors. The PE industry comprises both venture capital (VC) firms that fund high‐growth enterprises and leveraged buyout (LBO) firms that fund more traditional, cash‐generating operations. Mainly because of the greater risks associated with both VC‐backed firms and LBOs—risks that make them ill‐suited for most public investors—such companies tend to require the more direct and active oversight provided by PE investors. And as the author goes on to argue, the more direct and active ownership of PE investors, as compared to the governance provided by most public‐company boards, suggests that financial accounting and reporting play a fundamentally different role in private than in public companies. Whereas the primary role of public‐company GAAP has increasingly (since the creation of the SEC in 1933) been to provide information for outside investors when valuing companies, the most important function of accounting reports in private companies is internal control—more specifically, ensuring that the interests of the managers of their portfolio companies are aligned with those of all the providers of capital. And recognizing this difference in the role of accounting, both the IASB and FASB responded to the requests of various parties (including private companies) by approving in 2009 the use by private companies of a streamlined and more flexible set of accounting standards. To the extent that the workings of PE markets continue to reduce the numbers of U.S. public companies, the author predicts that the resulting increase in the use of private‐company GAAP will continue to shift the primary role of accounting away from valuation and back toward its traditional roots in internal control and corporate governance.  相似文献   

18.
Non‐financial reports alert investors to operational risks associated with issues such as insufficient access to natural resource inputs and related costly interruptions to production, while segment‐level reports alert investors to operational risk distribution across a firm. An important issue, to date unexplored, is how segment‐level non‐financial reporting has an impact on earnings predictions. We report the results of an experiment used to examine how mining company segment‐level water reports affect investors' earnings predictions, where water reports indicate whether the firm and its segments will have access to sufficient water to meet production needs. We find that investors do not change their earnings predictions when firm and segment‐level reports indicate low water risk but they do revise down their earnings predictions when firm and segment‐level water reports indicate high water risk. This is consistent with investors responding to the additional information provided in segment‐level reports confirming that water risk is high across the firm. Regardless of whether firm‐level water reports indicate high or low water risk, when segment‐level reports indicate that one segment is low water risk and another is high water risk, investors revise down their earnings predictions. This is consistent with investors recognizing that natural resource operational risk concentration in one segment can affect earnings more than evenly‐distributed risk. Overall, our findings suggest that belief‐adjustment theory explains how investors react to prospective operational risk information contained in segment‐level water reports according to the similarity of the segment‐level risks, and that this information is factored into earnings predictions.  相似文献   

19.
Despite a maturing industry of ESG professionals and coordinated efforts by shareholders calling for more responsible corporate behavior, we continue to see unabated climate and water crises, growing political instability, and continuing abuses of human rights in supply chains. The founder of a movement called The Shareholder Commons argues that to help business to address these systemic challenges, corporate responsibility must move beyond the company‐by‐company decision‐making model. An economy based on market competition cannot rely on individual businesses to adopt basic sustainability rules that take priority over profit. Critical sustainability boundaries must be implemented collectively to be effective. The crux of the problem is that although shareholder returns derive mainly from efficiency and productivity gains, they can also result from careless exploitation of common resources or powerless workers. And the competition for margin and capital makes it difficult for companies to recognize, let alone forgo, profitable exploitation. A sustainable economy demands that we help companies to distinguish between honorable and dishonorable profits, and to find ways to eliminate or offset the latter. The author holds out a model of capitalism that limits the availability of choices that exploit negative externalities and inequality while preserving the principles and practices that create value and a reasonable sharing of gains among all stakeholders. Universal owners—long‐term diversified investors—appear to be in the best position to formulate and enforce such a model, given the current design and practices of our capital markets. Such global investors have the incentive and power to engage in the collective decision‐making necessary for a sustainable economy. The power exerted by institutional investors through their allocation and stewardship of equity capital can be used to insist on more sustainable business practices. Because they are diversified across thousands of companies, universal owners can bypass the competitive bottleneck for margin and capital that holds sustainability back at the company level. These large investors can work together to establish authentic sustainability boundaries for the companies they invest in; and by so doing, they can allow us to leverage all the good work done to date on disclosure and ESG integration, and so realize a world in which companies continue to compete for profits, but also for a truly honorable harvest.  相似文献   

20.
我国商业保险在老年产业中的商业机会探究   总被引:3,自引:0,他引:3  
按照历史经验,商业保险公司的发展与其所在经济体中支柱性产业的发展密切相关.为探索我国老年产业的发展将对我国商业保险公司的发展所可能造成的影响,本文首先论证了我国老年产业将成为我国支柱性产业的可能性.并在此基础上,从扩展保费收入渠道以及扩展保险资金投资渠道两个方面,对商业保险公司在老年产业中的商业机会进行探讨.并就商业保...  相似文献   

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