In fall 2023, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hoover Institution Working Group on Corporate Governance, and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University collaborated with the MSCI Sustainability Institute to survey 47 major institutional investors and asset owners to understand how they incorporate ESG factors into investment decisions.
Key findings include the following:
- ESG integration is mainstream but is predominantly about governance
- ESG is primarily about risk reduction, and it is industry-specific
- Concern about the environment is almost entirely about climate change
- Investors on both sides of the Atlantic consider environmental, social, and governance risks in their decision-making but differently
- Investors use ESG to weed out bad actors