An Inside View of Corporate ESG Practices

Hoa Briscoe-Tran
Additional contact information
Hoa Briscoe-Tran: Ohio State University

Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics

Abstract: Both academics and practitioners use ESG indices to assess firms’ ESG practices, but these indices might not reflect firms’ internal practices. In this paper, I introduce an inside measure of ESG practices from 10 million employee reviews via a word-embedding model. The inside measure predicts a firm’s future misconduct, governance issues, downside risk, growth, and valuation. However, it is weakly correlated with a firm’s disclosed ESG practices and existing indices. The inside measure improves after a firm makes a public ESG commitment only when the commitment is costly. Examining cyber-attacks as a shock to a firm’s incentive to appear ESG-friendly, I show that the inside measure hardly improves after the shock.

JEL-codes: D22 G30 G34 M14 M40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3987291

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:ecl:ohidic:2021-21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().