Document Type
Working Paper
Date of this Version
2022
Advisor
Christopher Geczy
Abstract
This paper examines shareholder proposals provided by Institutional Shareholder Services from 2013 to 2020. It analyzes (1) the breakdown between SRI-related and governance related shareholder proposals over time and across industries, (2) trends in passage rates of SRI-related proposals over time and across industries, and (3) the relationship between passage rates of shareholder proposals and the ESG scores of the target firms. Using a simple linear regression, we find that (1) SRI-related proposal passage rates are on average 9.78% less than their non-SRI counterparts, when controlling for year fixed effects, (2) the average increase in passage rates of SRI-related proposals per year is 0.4%, (3) target companies whose proposals are passed by their shareholders have significantly poorer ESG-performance than target companies whose proposals did not pass, and this effect is augmented when looking specifically at SRI-related proposals.
Keywords
ESG, SRI
Date Posted: 26 September 2022