Excerpt
October 2022, Paper: "Using a sample of 3,083 firms from 62 countries over 18 years, we analyze how the structure and identity of firms’ material owners influence their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance. We find that firms with founding families or other individual investors as owners underperform, unless family members serve as CEOs, when they outperform all others. Non-family management and government entities also perform significantly better. These results are robust to multiple data and methodological stress tests. Our findings show that ownership matters for ESG performance, and give us an indication of the preferences of different types of owners regarding ESG."
Corporate Ownership and ESG Performance (Belén Villalonga, Peter Tufano, Boya Wang) October 2022