Daniel Schmidt won the GRASFI 2022 Best Paper Award in Transparency for Stakeholders for his paper "Which Institutional Investors Drive Corporate Sustainability?". The paper is joint work with Marco Ceccarelli (Maastricht University), Simon Glossner (Federal Reserve Board of Governors), and Mikael Homanen (UN PRI and Bayes Business School).

Paper abstract

Many institutional investors publicly commit to some form of responsible investment. This raises concerns about the credibility of such claims. We use participation in collaborative engagements to identify "Leaders," i.e., institutional investors that are truly committed to improving firms' sustainability outcomes. Despite owning only 2.2% of the average firm, Leaders alone explain the positive relationship between institutional ownership and firms' environmental and social performance. In line with committed owners facilitating corporate change, engagement campaigns are successful only when targeted firms are substantially owned by Leaders. We also find that these firms are less at risk of experiencing negative incidents.

About GRASFI

GRASFI (Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment) is a global alliance of research universities with the objective of promoting multi-disciplinary academic research on sustainable finance and investment. The GRASFI Annual Conference is the leading research conference on sustainable finance globally. This year's conference took place 5-7 September 2022 in Zurich with 42 accepted papers. For more information about the 2022 GRASFI Conference, please click here.