【讲座时间】2024年11月5日 14:00
【讲座地点】会计学院108室
【讲座主题】Does regulatory oversight discipline ESG funds to walk the talk?
【嘉宾介绍】孙成竹，香港理工大学助理教授
Chengzhu Sun is an Assistant Professor of School of Accounting and Finance, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She obtained the Ph.D. degree in accounting in 2021 and master degree in environment in 2016 from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She also visited Columbia University for one semester during her PhD study. Her research interests center on information economics, regulations/laws, and ESG, and she teaches ESG investment and green finance at master level. Her papers have been published on Review of Financial Studies, Accounting Review, Management Science, and Contemporary Accounting Research.
【内容提要】
There is a wide-spread concern that investment funds use the claim of ESG investing to attract investment flows without making real ESG-oriented investments. Exploiting the establishment of the SEC’s Climate and ESG Task Force (Task Force hereafter) as a plausible exogenous shock to regulatory oversight, we investigate whether securities regulators’ oversight disciplines the funds to “walk the talk”. We show that relative to non-ESG funds, ESG-labelled funds tilt their investment more towards firms with better ESG performance after the launch of the Task Force. Such changes are more pronounced among ESG-labelled funds with poorer pre-launch fund-level ESG performance and those located closer to the SEC, suggesting that the effect of regulatory oversight varies with proximity to the SEC and prior investment records. We further analyse the effect of the SEC’s enforcement actions and find that ESG-labelled funds not subject to the enforcement actions invest more in high-ESG firms in the post-sanction period, implying that the enforcement actions have a deterrent effect. Collectively, our results suggest the effectiveness of regulatory oversight in disciplining ESG-labelled funds’ investment decisions.
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