View article

The last decade has seen an exponential increase in corporate sustainability activities and efforts by investors to use these activities in their portfolio formation, valuation, and stewardship activities. According to the UN Sustainable Stock Exchanges, 44 exchanges around the world have released ESG disclosure guidance for their listed companies. Numerous nonfinancial regulations, including one at the European Union level, have promoted the disclosure of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data (Grewal, Rield, and Serafeim 2019), and several not-for-profit organizations, such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), have created disclosure standards that identify the ESG metrics that organizations should disclose. Figure 1 examines the assets under management of signatories of the Principles for Responsible Investing from 2013 to 2020, the value of total sustainable debt issuances by companies, and the volume of corporate ESG disclosures, as calculated by Bloomberg.