Consolidation of the ESG Rating Industry as an Enactment of Institutional Retrogression
Emma Avetisyan () and
Kai Hockerts
Additional contact information
Emma Avetisyan: Audencia Business School
Kai Hockerts: CBS - Copenhagen Business School [Copenhagen]
Post-Print from HAL
Abstract:
Since the late 1980s, a plethora of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) rating agencies have sprung up, developing new rating methodologies to meet the (new) needs of concerned investors and to help companies to improve their CSR performance. Since 2005, the industry of ESG ratings has witnessed an important number of both national and cross-border consolidations. Based on a set of 37 interviews and secondary data, the paper reveals growth strategies of ESG rating agencies and explores the driving forces and impacts behind this wave of consolidation. Our focus is on four ESG rating agencies based in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Switzerland. We have found financial motivation to be the main driver of consolidation. Additionally, and according to the perceptions of the ESG experts interviewed, a decrease in employee motivation coupled with a decrease in the quality of ESG research was observed to be one of the negative impacts of consolidation.
Keywords: ESG rating agencies; growth strategies; industry consolidation; socially; responsible investing; 2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://audencia.hal.science/hal-01695693
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)
Published in Business Strategy and the Environment, 2017, 26 (3), pp.316 - 330. ⟨10.1002/bse.1919⟩
Downloads: (external link)
https://audencia.hal.science/hal-01695693/document (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01695693
DOI: 10.1002/bse.1919
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().