George Serafeim

The Need for Sector‐Specific Materiality and Sustainability Reporting Standards

The market continues to show growing interest in how well companies are performing across a broad range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions. Partly as a result, the companies themselves are paying more attention to these performance dimensions, how they contribute to financial performance, and how to evaluate tradeoffs that arise. One of the greatest challenges facing both investors and companies in using ESG performance information is the absence of standards. Another challenge is knowing which of the many ESG dimensions are most material for a company in terms of creating value for shareholders and stakeholders over the long term. The authors argue that materiality and reporting standards must be developed on a sector‐by‐sector basis, and that failure to do so will result in inconsistent and even misleading disclosures. The authors illustrate this with the case of climate change. The SEC has already issued interpretive guidance on climate change disclosures, making it quite clear that existing regulations require companies to report on material effects of climate change, from both an upside and downside perspective. Based on an analysis of 10K filings in six industries, the authors show that, even within a given industry, there is substantial variation in reporting among companies that ranges from no disclosure, to boilerplate disclosure, industry‐specific interpretation, and the use of quantitative metrics. After providing further detail on this by looking at the airline and utilities industries, the authors conclude by offering a methodology for defining material ESG issues on a sector‐by‐sector basis that could provide the basis for developing key performance indicators.

Speaking of the Short-Term: Disclosure Horizon and Managerial Myopia

We study conference calls as a voluntary disclosure channel and create a proxy for the time horizon that senior executives emphasize in their communications. We find that our measure of disclosure time horizon is associated with capital market pressures and executives’ short-term monetary incentives. Consistent with the language emphasized during conference calls partially capturing short-termism, we show that our proxy is associated with earnings and real activities management. Overall, the results show that the time horizon of conference call narratives can be informative about managers’ myopic behavior.

The Stock Selection and Performance of Buy-Side Analysts

Prior research on equity analysts focuses almost exclusively on those employed by sell-side investment banks and brokerage houses. Yet investment firms undertake their own buy-side research and their analysts face different stock selection and recommendation incentives than their sell-side peers. We examine the selection and performance of stocks recommended by analysts at a large investment firm relative to those of sell-side analysts from mid-1997 to 2004. We find that the buy-side firm’s analysts issue less optimistic recommendations for stocks with larger market capitalizations and lower return volatility than their sell-side peers, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of interest and having a preference for liquid stocks. Tests with no controls for these effects indicate that annualized buy-side Strong Buy/Buy recommendations underperform those for sell-side peers by 5.9% using market-adjusted returns and by 3.8% using four-factor model abnormal returns. However, these findings are driven by differences in the stocks recommended and their market capitalization. After controlling for these selection effects, we find no difference in the performance of the buy- and sell-side analysts’ Strong Buy/Buy recommendations.

An Analysis of Firms' Self-Reported Anticorruption Efforts

We use Transparency International’s ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts to analyze factors underlying the ratings. Our tests examine whether these disclosures reflect firms’ real efforts to combat corruption or are cheap talk. We find that the ratings are related to enforcement and monitoring, country and industry corruption risk, and governance variables. Controlling for these effects and other ratings determinants, we find that firms with lower residual ratings have higher subsequent citations in corruption news events. They also report higher future sales growth and show a negative relation between profitability change and sales growth in high corruption geographic segments, but not in low corruption segments. The net effect on valuation from sales growth and changes in profitability is close to zero. The findings are robust to a number of sensitivity tests, including analysis of disclosures for a larger sample over multiple years. We conclude that, on average, firms’ disclosures signal real efforts to combat corruption.

Security Analyst Networks, Performance and Career Outcomes

Using a sample of 42,376 board directors and 10,508 security analysts we construct a social network, mapping the connections between analysts and directors, between directors, and between analysts. We use social capital theory and techniques developed in social network analysis to measure the analyst’s level of connectedness and investigate whether these connections provide any information advantage to the analyst. We find that better-connected (better-networked) analysts make more accurate, timely, and bold forecasts. Moreover, analysts with better network positions are less likely to lose their job, suggesting that these analysts are more valuable to their brokerage houses. We do not find evidence that analyst innate forecasting ability predicts an analyst’s future network position. In contrast, past forecast optimism has a positive association with building a better network of connections.

The Effect of Target Difficulty on Target Completion: The Case of Reducing Carbon Emissions

Corporations are increasingly under pressure to improve their environmental performance and to account for potential risks and opportunities associated with climate change. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of monetary and nonmonetary incentives provided by companies to their employees in order to reduce carbon emissions. Specifically, we find evidence that the use of monetary incentives is associated with higher carbon emissions. This result holds both in cross-sectional and time-series analysis. Moreover, we find that the use of nonmonetary incentives is associated with lower carbon emissions. Consistent with monetary incentives crowding out motivation for pro-social behavior, we find that the effect of monetary incentives on carbon emissions is mitigated when these incentives are provided to employees with formally assigned responsibility for environmental performance. Furthermore, by employing a two-stage multinomial logistic model, we provide insights into factors affecting companies’ decisions on incentive provision, as well as showing that the impact of monetary incentives on carbon emissions remains significant even when we control for potential selection bias in our sample.  Robert G. Eccles is a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. Ioannis Ioannou is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. Shelley Xin Li is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School. George Serafeim is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. We are grateful to the Carbon Disclosure Project and in particular to Maia Kutner for giving access to the investor survey data. We thank Andrew Knauer for excellent research assistance. All errors are solely our own responsibility. Contact author: George Serafeim gserafeim@hbs.edu.Setting targets and providing monetary incentives are two widely used motivating tools to achieve desirable organizational outcomes. We focus on reduction of carbon emissions as a setting in which to examine how target difficulty and monetary incentives provided to managers affect the degree of target completion. We use a novel dataset compiled by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) that yields a sample of 1,127 firms from around the world. We find that firms setting more difficult targets or providing monetary incentives are able to complete a higher percentage of the target. The effect of target difficulty on target completion is nonlinear: above a certain level, stretching the target decreases the percentage of target completion. Moreover, we find that bundling difficult targets together with monetary incentives negatively affects the degree of target completion, suggesting that these two motivating tools act as substitutes in our setting. Finally, we provide evidence that both target difficulty and monetary incentives motivate managers to a) undertake more carbon reducing projects that generate more carbon savings, and b) invest more money in such projects, without increasing the average payback period of the project portfolio.

FIN Around the World: The Contribution of Financing Activity to Profitability

We study how the availability of domestic credit influences the contribution that financing activities make to a firm’s return on equity (ROE). Using a sample of 51,866 firms from 69 countries, we find that financing activities contribute more to a firm’s ROE in countries with higher domestic credit. The higher contribution of financing activities is not driven by firms taking greater leverage in these countries, but by firms realizing a higher spread (i.e., a greater difference in operating performance and borrowing cost) when more domestic credit is available. Also, we find that firms partially substitute trade credit for financial credit, with large firms exhibiting the greatest rate of substitution. For small firms, the rate of substitution improves with the country’s available domestic credit, while large firms are insensitive to this friction. The findings suggest that both country and firm-level factors have a significant impact on how financing activities contribute to corporate performance.

The Value Relevance of Corporate Sustainability Disclosures: An Analysis of a Dataset from One Large Asset Owner

Corporate environmental and social reporting lacks the comparability across companies that is a characteristic of financial information. To address this weakness, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) created analytical frameworks to measure the quality and scope of reporting relating to three focus areas: climate change, water and children’s rights. By translating information published by a global set of companies into standardized data, NBIM has constructed a dataset that can be used for analyzing and comparing companies across time and within sectors. The purpose of this project is to understand the value relevance of NBIM’s dataset. First, we model the determinants of the disclosure scores and climate change performance score. Consistent with prior literature, we find that firms that are larger, higher growth, less closely held and with higher analyst coverage tend to disclose more. We find that the climate change performance score is less a function of observable firm characteristics and is more idiosyncratic. This highlights the different dynamics of measures that capture actual performance, versus metrics that capture disclosures of efforts. Next, we take the ‘residual’ scores – the part of the scores that is uncorrelated with observable firm characteristics, industry and country membership – and test for associations with future financial performance. Across all of our models, the residual disclosure score is not robustly correlated with any metric of future financial performance. However, we find that the residual component of the climate change performance score is significantly related to future financial performance. We find even stronger associations for the subset of firms that have above median exposure to climate change risks. We perform supplementary analysis to understand the motivation behind these disclosures. We find that some firms choose to disclose more because they are currently facing more problems, as measured by the level of negative media attention that the firm receives on the focal issue. We also find that firms disclosing more in the past received more negative media attention on that focal issue in the future. These results hold after controlling for factors, such as firm size, that influence both media attention and disclosure levels. This suggests that higher disclosure around an issue is not necessarily indicative of better current or future performance on the issue but in some cases, it is a signal of future bad news. Conversely, we find a negative relation between the climate change performance score and the current level of negative media attention, suggesting that this performance measure indeed captures meaningful efforts to manage climate-related risks.

Executive Summary: The Power of Transparency

Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim, ‘The consequences of mandatory corporate sustainability reporting’, Working Paper, 30 March 2011.

Stock Price Synchronicity and Material Sustainability Information

As part of the SEC’s revision of Regulation S-K, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social and governance (ESG) data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which sustainability disclosures are financially material. To inform this issue, we examine materiality standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). We find firms voluntarily disclosing more SASB-identified sustainability information have higher stock price informativeness. In contrast, sustainability disclosures not identified as material by SASB are not associated with informativeness. Our result is robust to including controls for sustainability performance ratings, analyst forecasts, insider trading, institutional ownership, earnings quality and other voluntary disclosure activity. Changes in material sustainability disclosure are followed by changes in stock price informativeness. Differences-in-differences estimates suggest that following the release of SASB standards, the treatment group of firms increased SASB-identified sustainability disclosure relative to the control group of firms and that the treatment group experienced an increase in stock price informativeness. The results are stronger for firms with higher exposure to sustainability issues, greater institutional and socially responsible investment fund ownership, and coverage from analysts with lower portfolio complexity. Moreover, we document intra-industry information transfers to firms with low SASB-identified sustainability disclosure in industries where firms have higher SASB-identified sustainability disclosure.We examine if, and under what conditions, disclosure of sustainability information identified as investor relevant by market-driven innovations in accounting standard-setting, is associated with stock prices reflecting more firm-specific information and thereby lower synchronicity with market and industry returns. We find that firms voluntarily disclosing more sustainability information, identified as material by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), have lower stock price synchronicity. This result is stronger for firms with higher exposure to sustainability issues, institutional and socially responsible investment fund ownership and coverage from analysts with less firm-specific experience and lower portfolio complexity. Moreover, we find intra-industry information transfers to firms with low sustainability disclosure within industries with high sustainability disclosure. We also document that sustainability information not identified by the accounting standard setting process is not associated with stock price synchronicity.