Center News
Susan Williams – Thursday, March 8, 2012
The natural gas industry is technologically capable of tapping vast shale gas resources in the United States, but it is unclear if all companies can successfully manage the complex array of environmental and social risks that could impede profitable extraction. Companies also vary in the quality, quantity and timeliness of their disclosure regarding shale gas activities, and generally need to replace anecdotal descriptions of some innovations with consistent and comprehensive data across their operations. This study Discovering Shale Gas: An Investor Guide to Hydraulic Fracturing, with input from a panel of advisers from industry, environmental organizations and investment managers, identifies the full range of issues for investors and others to consider.
Center News
Mark E. Bateman, Peter A. Soyka – Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Investors and companies are both increasingly interested in sustainability issues. These issues typically revolve around environmental and social factors that have real but potentially long-term or contingent impacts on corporate financial value. This, in turn, makes traditional accounting metrics less valuable in assessing sustainability issues than in analysis of many other business issues. Therefore, both investors and companies — as well as groups that service or monitor and regulate them — have a growing interest in receiving meaningful corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information on an ongoing basis. Despite this shared interest, investors often complain about the difficulty of gathering and truly understanding corporate ESG data, while company representatives may express concerns about “survey fatigue,” or the amount of time and resources it takes to supply the requested data to various investors and ESG research firms. This report explores and documents the extent to which corporate ESG information tracked and managed internally by companies is consistent with analogous information sought by external parties, and in particular, by ESG investors and the research companies that serve them.
Center News
Funding from IRRC Institute – Tuesday, February 21, 2012
The Institute has announced the recipients of a new annual IRRC Institute Research Award. This competition examines the interaction of the real economy with investment theory. A blue-ribbon panel of judges selected two papers — one practitioner and one academic. Download the winning academic paper here:
Center News
Funding from IRRC Institute – Tuesday, February 21, 2012
The Institute has announced the recipients of a new annual IRRC Institute Research Award. This competition examines the interaction of the real economy with investment theory. A blue-ribbon panel of judges selected two papers — one practitioner and one academic. Download the winning practitioner paper here:
Center News
IRRC Institute – Sunday, February 12, 2012
A new analysis indicates that environmental and social (E+S) shareholder proposals are gaining increased voting support from investors at U.S. public companies. From 2005-2011, average support for these proposals more than doubled, from about 10% to more than 20%. At the same time, the proportion of shareholder-sponsored resolutions on E+S matters grew by a third, from about 30% to 40%, for all proposals going to a vote. Also, the proportion of higher scoring proposals increased as indicated in the chart below.
Center News
Funding from IRRC Institute, The Fair Labor Association, The Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project at Harvard Law School – Sunday, January 1, 2012
Harvard Law School’s Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project, part of the Labor and Worklife Program, has completed Stage 1 of an initiative to develop key performance indicators (KPIs) for investors to assess labor and human rights (LHR) risks faced by global corporations in their supply chains. A draft set of KPIs was developed with the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in consultation with more than 100 global asset owners and asset managers and other experts. Stage 2 of the initiative has now begun to beta test the KPIs with nine FLA companies that collectively source from 1,755 factories that employ around 1.8 million workers in 62 countries.
