Dear Fellow Supporters of Integrated Reporting,
September 24, 2019 Special Edition on Aggregate Confusion and Conference at Berkeley
“Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings” by Florian Berg, Julian F. Koelbel, and Roberto Rigobon. The Abstract:
“This paper investigates the divergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings. First, the paper documents the disagreement between the ESG ratings of five prominent rating agencies. The paper proceeds to trace the disagreement to the most granular level of ESG categories that is available and decomposes the overall divergence into three sources: Scope divergence related to the selection of different sets of categories, measurement divergence related to different assessment of ESG categories, and weight divergence related to the relative importance of categories in the computation of the aggregate ESG score. We find that measurement divergence explains more than 50 percent of the overall divergence. Scope and weight divergence together are slightly less important. In addition, we detect a rater effect, i.e., the rating agencies’ assessment in individual categories seems to be influenced by their view of the analyzed company as a whole. The results allow investors, companies, and researchers to understand why ESG ratings differ.
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Kind regards,
Bob