It’s climate week in The Big Apple! And the perfect time to take a look at different investment approaches to a low-carbon transition. We talk through financial risks and opportunities for companies, transition funds, and how the things are playing out in bond markets.

Maybe a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but that’s not going to fly for sustainability funds in the EU. On this episode we break down ESMA’s latest fund guidelines and discuss their place in a regulatory landscape with all kinds of moving pieces.

Climate. ESG bubbles. Disclosure. Social inequality. Biodiversity. The topics don’t get much bigger — or more systemic. Here’s our analysis of the five ESG trends that will matter most to companies and their investors in 2021.

Climate. ESG bubbles. Disclosure. Social inequality. Biodiversity. The topics don’t get much bigger — or more systemic. Here’s our analysis of the five ESG trends that will matter most to companies and their investors in 2021.

ESG themes are long-term, but some can emerge with sudden force. We are watching five trends we believe will unfold in 2020 to catapult ESG investing into the new decade.

We highlight five trends we believe will unfold over 2020: Climate change innovators: spotting the sleeping giants; new terms for capital: ready or not, here comes ESG; Re-valuing real estate: investing in the eye of the hurricane; the new human capital paradox: Juggling layoffs and shortages; and keeping score on stakeholder capitalism: looking for accountability in all the new places.

Looking in one’s backyard for human capital.

Many investors want to stick to their values or beliefs, as well as meet certain financial objectives. How can ESG indexes  help them address these goals?

We examined constituents of the MSCI ACWI Index that had been recognized as innovators on one or more annual lists produced by Forbes, Fast Company, MIT Sloan and the Boston Consulting Group between 2015 and 2018.

California companies with no women on their boards are going to have to quickly up their diversity game.

This joint discussion paper from MSCI and the OECD proposes a framework for discussion around investment options and the potential role of institutional investors in achieving the SDGs.

Is my money helping solve the world’s problems or making them worse? An increasing number of the beneficiaries of public funds, globally, are asking such searching questions about where and how their retirement funds are invested. Understanding how investments have an impact on societal issues can be much more complex and difficult to identify for institutional investors.

When it comes to ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, conventional wisdom holds that G is the only part that really matters, as a window into overall management quality and providing insights and value for investors. Our analysis suggests this has not been true; that the E and S aspects of ESG did help sort the truly outstanding firms from a group that already shares an array of robust financial traits.

In this paper we apply an ESG filter to a highly selective universe of 100 companies that have already been screened for value creation as measured by ROIC, economic spread, margins and asset turnover ratio. We found that those with higher ESG Ratings had higher average ROIC and were valued at a premium compared to companies with lower ESG ratings.

Studies have asked whether having multiple women on a board of directors has translated into better financial performance. But is that the whole story? Does the number of women on boards relate to a company’s overall human capital policies and its financial performance? Our findings suggest that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Companies with both a more diverse board and stronger talent management practices enjoyed higher growth in employee productivity compared to companies...

MSCI ESG Research has reported annually on the state of women’s representation on corporate boards of directors since 2014, continuing the work begun by GMI Ratings in 2009. Over the course of 2018, we will provide a suite of analysis as part of the MSCI ESG Corporate Gender Diversity Series. In this paper we provide an update on the advancement of women on the boards and in the executive suites of large global companies. Overall progress has been slow, even lagging the business-as-usual rate...

A Study of Three Portfolio Strategies The broad effects of excluding entire business lines, typical of the more traditional values-aligned of a socially responsible portfolio, are generally understood. However, little research has been done on the performance implications of exclusions based on alleged corporate wrongdoing, though such exclusions are common. In this study, we investigate the risk and return impact of excluding companies involved in events negatively impacting stakeholders,...

Japan’s government has set goals for increasing women’s participation and promotion in the business world, a policy that research shows could have substantial benefits for Japanese firms and the overall economy. Women are a historically underutilized resource in Japan; their greater participation and advancement in the workforce could have substantial benefits for the Japanese economy and long-term portfolio returns. The Japan Empowering Women Index (WIN) aims to overweight companies whose...

The pace of women’s integration into corporate boards and executive suites around the world remains slow, and women’s pay still lags that of their male peers. But there is evidence that a shift is afoot in the U.S., MSCI research shows. Has gender pay parity arrived in the executive suite?

msci woman on boards 2016 A growing body of research shows that having three women on a corporate board represents a “tipping point” in terms of influence, which is reflected in financial performance. U.S. companies that began the 2011-2016 period with at least three women on the board experienced median gains in Return on Equity (ROE) of 10 percentage points and Earnings Per Share (EPS) of 37%. In contrast, companies that began the period with no female directors experienced median changes...

This brief is aimed at institutional investors facing the possibility or necessity of divesting from some type of fossil fuel holdings. Approaches to explicit divestment have multiplied since the early days of the Carbon Tracker 200 list, as investors now have a better understanding of mechanisms to manage carbon in portfolios, including using revenue and power generation data in addition to reserves ownership. We found that the most common approaches are designed to optimize for fossil fuel...

Values-based institutional investors have long focused their attention on companies that run private detention and correctional facilities on behalf of federal and state governments due largely to concerns about charges of poor conditions. More recently, some private prison operators have become involved in immigration detention center operation as an expansion of their established operations in the for-profit prison business, while at the same time issues of displacement and refugee...