题　目：ESG Rating Ambiguity, Institutional Incompatibility, and Investment Decisions

嘉　宾：Bingkun Zhang, PhD candidate, University of Hong Kong

主　持：李诗科, 助理教授, 上海交通大学

时　间：2024年09月25日（周三）10:00-11:30

地　点：上海交通大学 徐汇校区安泰楼A303室

内容简介:

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating ambiguity, defined as the divergence of ESG ratings across different agencies, has gained increasing scholarly attention and is often characterized as a problem for the intended audience because extant research assumes that audiences use ratings for evaluation purposes, and rating ambiguity makes stocks hard to evaluate. However, extant research has not adequately examined the conditions under which the intended audience can use ESG rating ambiguity to their own advantage. Extending the literature on strategic responses to institutional pressures and the research on ratings, we contribute by theorizing how ESG investors, the main audience of ESG rating, can take advantage of ESG rating ambiguity to rationalize controversial investment decisions so that these decisions can appear simultaneously congruent with incompatible institutional demands from the financial logic and the social logic inherent in ESG investing. We analyze a panel dataset comprising 7,248 firms across 67 countries between 2006 and 2021, focusing on green stocks and sin stocks that exemplify incompatible institutional demands. We find that ESG rating ambiguity increases ESG investor holding in sin stocks, an effect strengthened by the maximum score of the multiple ratings, and decreases ESG investor holding in green stocks, an effect strengthened by the minimum score of the multiple ratings. Our findings remain, using a difference-in-differences analysis based on a regulatory shock, addressing the alternative explanation (i.e., investors use financial returns as a non-ambiguous criterion) and using different measures and rating coverage.

演讲人简介：

Bingkun Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Department of Management and Strategy, University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on non-market strategy, ESG, international business, and organization theory. In his first research stream of ESG, Bingkun studies the drivers of firm sustainability and how firms or investors strategically respond to a variety of institutional pressures regarding sustainability efforts, such as climate policy, green finance campaigns, and green credit policy. In his second research stream of IB, Bingkun focuses on global supply chain management, where he studies how geopolitical risk and robotization influence MNC’s supply chain involvement in the host country. His dissertation topic is physical climate change exposure and green skill hiring.

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