Joint Seminar with FACTS Research Center of the School of Business and Economics and LSC—The Laws of Social Cohesion and part of the seminar series Preventing Corporate Misconduct.

This paper investigates whether employees have useful information for assessing firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices. I analyze 10.4 million anonymous employee reviews via a word-embedding model to construct an inside view of corporate ESG practices.

The inside view has useful information beyond external ratings in predicting a firm’s future misconduct, governance issues, downside risk, growth, and valuation. In addition, the inside view appears robust to greenwashing, both theoretically and empirically. In various settings including a novel exogenous shock, I show that low-cost changes in a firm’s stated ESG policies do not affect the inside view while more expensive changes do.

See the paper on ecgi here.

Time & Location

19 May 2023 | 02:15–3:45 PM
In-person & online with remote presentation
Business School | Thielallee 73 | Seminar room 010
Join via fuels.berlin/webex