Nature picture as illustration for female ESG investing research blog

Female ESG power and more (Researchposting 111)

Female ESG power: >10x new research on human rights ratings, child care, female ESG power, climate defaults, brown offloads, green consumers, green benchmarks, transition risks, ESG shocks, leasing, UN PRI, timberland and hedge funds by Gaizka Ormazabal, Frauke Peter, Joshua Rauh, Thierry Roncalli et al.

Social research: Female ESG power

Human rights ratings? ESG Ratings and Human Rights Due Diligence – How can ESG ratings be used to assess the human rights due diligence practices of companies? by Emil Sirén Gualinga as of Jan.4th, 2023 (#45): “… the paper examined the relationship between ESG ratings and Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) scores. The findings indicate that in general, ESG scores are not a good proxy for assessing companies’ human rights due diligence processes and practices. Moreover, whereas the relationship between ESG ratings and CHRB scores are inconsistent, a low score on Refinitiv and ISS may indicate that a company lacks adequate human rights due diligence processes. Conversely, a high score on Refinitiv or ISS is not necessarily an indicator of strong human rights due diligence processes. Lastly, the paper also acknowledges that the CHRB itself has limitations, as it does not preclude companies with a track record of being involved in human rights abuses from achieving high scores” (p. 15).

Social application-help: Early Child Care and Labor Supply of Lower-SES Mothers: A Randomized Controlled Trial by Henning Hermes, Marina Krauß, Philipp Lergetporer, Frauke Peter, Simon Wiederhold as of Jan.3rd, 2023 (#16): “We present experimental evidence that enabling access to universal early child care for families with lower socioeconomic status (SES) increases maternal labor supply. Our intervention provides families with customized help for child care applications … The treatment increases lower-SES mothers’ full-time employment rates by 9 percentage points (+160%), household income by 10%, and mothers’ earnings by 22%. … Overall, the treatment substantially improves intra-household gender equality in terms of child care duties and earnings“ (abstract).

Female ESG power: The Eco Gender Gap in Boardrooms by Po-Hsuan Hsu, Kai Li, and Yihui Pan as of Jan. 3rd, 2023 (#151): “Using novel firm- and facility-level measures of corporate environmental performance over the period 2002–2021, we establish a robust and positive association between board gender diversity and corporate environmental performance. This relation appears to be causal … We find that female directors bring more expertise on sustainability in boardrooms than male directors. Female directors are more likely to sit on sustainability-related committees and key monitoring committees than male directors. Boards with more female directors are more likely to link top executives’ compensation to corporate ESG performance” (p. 34). My comment: Similar results see 140227 ESG_Paper_V3 1 (naaim.org)

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