Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing is rapidly growing in popularity. As more investors grow interested in the ESG investing, the funds theoretically have more reason to highlight their engagement with the ESG-related activities. In the research paper by Andrikogiannopoulou et al. (2022), authors first use textual analysis to assess how and how much the funds talk about ESG-related topics in their prospectuses, and then they compare this measure with the funds’ actual ESG engagement. The discrepancy between the words in their prospectus (high rate of mentioning ESG investing-related topics) and the fund’s acts (not being as green as illustrated in the prospectus) allows the authors to identify the greenwashing funds and take a closer look at their performance.

Socially responsible investing, also known as ESG investing, is a recent trend in the world of portfolio management. More and more investors have started to look into the Environmental, Social, and Governance scores of the companies they invest in. However, one major problem with ESG scoring is that there is not one universal scoring system. Many companies sell ESG data, but the scores are not comparable, and additionally, the ESG data providers are not very transparent about how they create the ratings. These problems with ESG data mean we need to have a method to grade and merge the information from multiple providers.

Climate change is becoming a central topic among economists, investors, politicians and the general public as well. Scientists warn us that we have to act immediately, but it is not that simple because becoming environmentally friendly is not cheap, and we are somewhat reluctant even though we have only one Earth. Moreover, while fighting climate change might be seen as a cost for developed economies, less developed economies frequently do not have many alternatives to fossil fuels.

ESG scores are the modern trend in the financial markets, and while this sustainable investing has its critics, it seems to become a regular part of the markets. Frequently, and probably rightfully, ESG is criticized for the lack of commonality across various “scorers”, and as a result, there might be a large dispersion among the score of one firm. The reason is that the score usually consists of different metrics and aggregation methodology. Apart from this “long-term” score, investors can easily recognize the “short-term” score, which can be proxied by negative incidents such as pollution, poor social aspects, social or governance scandals and so on. Moreover, these incidents could be more informative about (un)sustainable practice compared to ESG scores. These ESG incidents are studied by the novel research of Simon Glossner (2021). Using incidents news, the author provides interesting results that mainly support proponents of sustainable investing. Poor ESG performance proxied by incidents predicts more incidents in the future, lower profitability which should subsequently spill to negative performance in future. For example, portfolios consisting of negative incidents stocks significantly underperform the market for both US and European stocks. Therefore, this research paper is a compelling addition to the literature that, apart from social aspects, connects ESG also with performance.

ESG scores are already well-established, and nobody doubts that the scores affect investors or companies. Investors seem to care more and more about the other aspects of the stocks and not just the profits – the human welfare, ecology or social aspects of our lives. Additionally, numerous researches point out that the the ESG scores can positively affect also the portfolios. However, the novel research by Colak et al. (2020), has examined other implications of the ESG scores: how the ESG affect the CEOs. To be more precise, how the adverse ESG events and subsequent negative media attention affects the longevity of the CEOs. The finding is that negative event significantly increase the probability of the CEO being replaced. Overall, the research paper highlights the importance of ESG scores in the corporate world.

Nobody can doubt that in the recent period, ESG investing has significantly grown and is a staple part of the financial markets. The academic literature has also grown with the popularity of ESG investing. The negative, mixed and positive results for ESG scores in portfolios have evolved, and generally, there is a consent that ESG scoring can be a vital part of the portfolio management process. It can be observed that in the past, the ESG scores were not priced in the equity market and still, the ESG is not priced in the corporate bond market (apart from Europe). Nowadays, the investors react to the ESG scores, but the research paper of Cui and Docherty (2020) has novel insights that investors may react too much to the ESG. Their research shows that investors overreact to the negative ESG events and stocks connected with negative ESG events sharply fall, but the prices have mean-reverting properties. As a result, there is a reversal after bad ESG events. Stocks firstly sharply fall, but then their prices are reverted to the previous values. Therefore, this paper is interesting from the market pricing or efficiency point, but it also can be utilized by a reversal investor.