是的,环境、社会和治理提高回报。斯里兰卡吗?并非如此。

Anoped in the Financial Times by Bob Monksintroduced me toa nice report by Deutsche Bankthat examines the entire body of research focusing on the investment performance of ESG, CSR, and SRI policies. It’s worth reading, as it shows which of these tools actually work ... and which don’t. Let's investigate.

Let me firstshow youwhat the authors did:

“We looked at over 100 studies and then we included in our analysis 56 research papers, as well as 2 literature reviews and 4 meta studies. To increase the confidence in the results presented in the reviewed papers we chose to include papers that met a minimum level of academic rigor. Accordingly, we excluded papers that have been working papers and have not been published for more than five years, we only included papers published in well known journals, and excluded papers where we were concerned with methodological problems in terms of selection bias and correlated omitted variables.”

In short, they restricted their lit review to only the best (i.e., peer-reviewed and published) papers. I think that's wise, as there’s plenty of poor research floating around these days. So, what did they find in these studies?

“100% of the academic studies agree that companies with high ratings for CSR and ESG factors have a lower cost of capital in terms of debt (loans and bonds) and equity. In effect, the market recognizes that these companies are lower risk than other companies and rewards them accordingly. This finding alone should put the issue of Sustainability squarely into the office of the Chief Financial Officer, if not the board, of every company.”

“我们调查的89%的研究表明，ESG因素评级高的公司表现出基于市场的表现，而85%的研究表明，这些类型的公司表现出基于会计的表现。在这里，市场再次显示出公司的财务业绩与其认为有利的ESG战略之间的相关性，至少在中期（3-5年）到长期（5-10年）是如此。”

So ESG is legit. Very interesting. But what about SRI?

“At the same time, we are able to show that... SRI adds little upside, although it does not underperform either. Exclusion, in many senses, is essentially a values-based or ethical consideration for investors.”

因此，让我总结一下：许多人认为SRI的负面筛选似乎根本不会影响回报。但是（！）这个等式的ESG方面似乎确实创造了价值：较低的资本成本以及财务和会计业绩。简言之，ESG似乎为长期投资者提供了一种机制，使他们比市场上的普通投资者获得更高的回报。因此，这就提出了一个重要的问题：为什么机构投资者的参与度如此之低？毕竟，即使是ESG的拥护者，像CalPERS一样，也很难让自己的人相信ESG的价值(亚博赞助欧冠或者至少说服他们的董事会). 为什么会这样？这是作者的观点explanation:

“These conclusions go a long way towards explaining why the concept of sustainable investing has taken so long to gain acceptance and even now inspires indifference and even cynicism among many investors. It has been too closely associated for too long with the SRI fund manager results which are not only an extremely broad category (i.e. in terms of investment mandate), but historically were based more on exclusionary – as opposed to positive or best-in-class – screening. ESG investing, by contrast, takes the best-in-class approach. By analyzing the various categories within the universe of sustainable investing, we can now say confidently that the ESG approach, at an analytical level, works for investors and for companies both in terms of cost of capital and corporate financial performance (on a market and accounting basis). It is now a question of ESG best-in-class funds capturing the available returns.”

I buy that. And I also really like Bob Monk’sexplanation; so I’m going to give him the final word:

“对ESG研究的抵制也从现代世界普遍存在的过度智力专业化中汲取了力量。亚当·斯密和他那个时代的许多伟大思想家并没有把他们的研究范围局限于一个单一的领域，如经济、政治或社会福利。相反，他们写的是政治经济学，这门学科试图理解个人、公司、市场和政府如何为社会利益进行最佳互动。随着第二次世界大战后现代金融理论的发展，我们失去了这种整体视角。”

Indeed.