Measuring Corporate Virtue—And Vice

Abstract

An increasing number of corporations aspire to meet demands to improve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. The stakeholders interested in ESG measures extend well beyond investors and the companies’ own management to include employees at the company and in its supply chain, consumers, regulators, and those subject to the company’s environmental and social impacts. Despite the huge differences between ESG and financial reporting, we believe that practices developed in financial reporting can contribute to achieving high-quality ESG reporting. In particular, we suggest that a comprehensive framework for ESG reporting must address the following three factors: (1) a limited set of metrics, primarily concerned with a company’s key environmental and social impacts; (2) a standard-setting body loosely modeled on the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to develop and particularize those metrics; and (3) reporting infrastructures that allow companies to collect, report, and verify the relevant metrics accurately.