Management and disclosure of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues have received substantial interest over the last decade. In this paper, we outline a framework of how ESG issues become financially material, affecting corporate profitability and valuation. We argue that...

This paper examines whether -- in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements -- shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms' exposure to climate change risks. We find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate change risks,...

Shareholder activism on sustainability issues has become increasingly prevalent over the years, with the number of proposals filed doubling from 1999 to 2013. We use recent innovations in accounting standard setting to classify 2,665 shareholder proposals that address environmental and social...

We examine CEO compensation, CEO retention policies, and M&A decisions in firms where founders serve as a director with a non-founder CEO (founder-director firms). We find that founder-director firms offer a different mix of incentives to their CEOs than other firms. Pay for performance...

The seemingly never ending scandals in the world of finance with their damaging effects on value and human welfare argue strongly for an addition to the current paradigm of financial economics. We summarize here our new theory of integrity that reveals integrity as a purely positive phenomenon...

Using newly-available materiality classifications of sustainability topics, we develop a novel dataset by hand-mapping sustainability investments classified as material for each industry into firm-specific sustainability ratings. This allows us to present new evidence on the value implications...

As part of the SEC's revision of Regulation S-K, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which sustainability disclosures are...