In the Sustainable Finance Brown-Bag Seminar, internationally recognized sustainable finance experts present and discuss current research results. The seminar series explicitly addresses an international audience and shall facilitate the formation of cross-border networks among sustainable finance scholars and an interdisciplinary discourse. In this way, the seminar series aims on promoting scientific cooperation and contributing to the development of synergy potentials.
The Brown-Bag Seminar is jointly organized by the accompanying project Sustainable Finance and Climate Protection (SFCP) for the funding measure “Climate Protection and Finance” of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Sustainable Finance Research Platform (WPSF) funded by Stiftung Mercator. This cooperation shall contribute to a greater integration and further development of sustainable finance research in Germany.
We are pleased to invite you to the fifth event in the Brown-Bag Seminar series.
In the upcoming seminar, Prof. Dr. Kornelia Fabisik from the University of Bern will present her paper “The G in ESG: How Good are the Governance Ratings in ESG Ratings?”. To offer a glimpse of the content, here is the paper’s abstract:
I study the quality of the governance pillar of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) ratings. Since 2018, ESG integration strategies, many of which rely on ESG ratings, have dominated the ESG investing sphere. I examine the governance ratings’ ability to provide useful information to shareholders. My results not only suggest rather limited success in predicting relevant firm outcomes (such as financial-statement restatements, governance incidents, class action lawsuits, operating performance, firm value, stock returns, and credit ratings), but in the case of most raters, I identify multiple instances of counterintuitive results, that is, with the opposite direction of the effect.
