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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

최신자료
ESG Confusion and Stock Returns: Tackling the Problem of Noise
NBER
2022.10.31
How does ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance affect stock returns? Answering this question is difficult because existing measures of ESG perfor- mance ― ESG ratings ― are noisy and, therefore, standard regression estimates suffer from attenuation bias. To address the bias, we propose two noise-correction procedures, in which we instrument ESG ratings with ratings of other ESG rating agencies, as in the classical errors-in-variables problem. The corrected estimates demonstrate that the effect of ESG performance on stock returns is stronger than previously estimated: after correcting for attenuation bias, the coefficients increase on average by a factor of 2.6, implying an average noise-to-signal ratio of 61.7%. The attenuation bias is stable across horizons at which stock returns are measured. In simulations, our noise-correction pro- cedures outperform the standard approaches followed by practitioners such as averages or principal component analysis.