Green bonds are fixed-income securities issued by private corporations or public bodies (such as central banks or governments) to finance environmentally beneficial (“green”) projects. They are a relatively novel creation of international finance (what is considered the first ever green bond, the European Investment Bank’s “Climate Awareness Bond”, was created in 2007), but one that… Read More »
In recent years, the financial industry has been increasingly pressured to actively contribute to addressing critical societal challenges, such as climate change. Now, many investors expect their money to be managed in a way that promotes positive environmental and social change. Given these expectations, there is a growing interest in understanding the real impact of… Read More »
Variance among assessments of a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) activities is not necessarily the product of error or bias, as is sometimes presumed in the literature. The presumption that there is a singular ESG value at which assessments must converge is counter-productive to the very nature of ESG reforms, which stem from the… Read More »
Climate change poses one of the most pressing risks to our society and the global economy, with profound and wide-ranging consequences. Research has shown that rising temperatures and tropical cyclones reduce the global economic growth rate by approximately 0.25 and 1.3 percentage points per year (Burke, Hsiang, and Miguel, 2015; Carleton and Hsiang, 2016). Despite… Read More »
In Woke Capital Revisited, a symposium piece connected with the 2022 Berle Conference, I argue that an expanded definition of corporate purpose and the social expectation of how public companies should act have created an environment where corporations now play an increasingly prominent role in diversifying leadership. However, the scope of how widely inclusive corporate… Read More »
Several decades ago, the idea of corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) was not entirely acceptedby most corporations or legal scholars. Most scholars today, and many corporations, understand that corporations owe special commitments to their stakeholders in addition to their traditional function of maximizing profits for the benefit of their shareholders. It is also accepted that corporations’… Read More »
There is an urgent need to mobilize global capital for climate action, particularly in emerging markets. Songwe, Stern, and Bhattacharya (2022) estimate that developing countries, excluding China, will need to spend approximately $1 trillion per year by 2025 and around $2.4 trillion per year by 2030 on sustainability and transition-related investments. To meet China’s carbon… Read More »
In August 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a landmark piece of legislation designed primarily to help the United States decarbonize while reviving domestic manufacturing. One of the most important novel programs in the IRA is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF. The GGRF is a $27 billion pool of grant… Read More »
Privately owned companies far outnumber public ones. They constitute the lion’s share of the companies in our world and, accordingly, have a comprehensive impact on commercial reality. There are over 25,000,000 private companies in the U.S. and around 4,000 public ones. Furthermore, while the number of public corporations is lower than its peak in the… Read More »
Over the past year, three converging trends have put environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) topics at the center of yet another polarizing national debate. ESG Mainstreaming. The first is that investments that integrate ESG factors in some way have gone mainstream over the past decade. ESG is no longer limited to “sustainable, responsible, and impact”… Read More »
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