Socially Responsible Investing : a comparative analysis of environmental, social, governance, reputational and labor factors

Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) aims to deliver competitive investment returns while fostering social good. It aims achieves its objective by including a firm's corporate social performance (CSP) in its investment d s . I has giesgnfct momentum over the past few years and is poised to assume a mainstream role in the asset management business. However, the scholarship on the effect of corporate social performance on a firm's corporate financial performance (CFP) is ambiguous. CSP is a complex entity made of multi-dimensional sub-components. This thesis attempts to breakdown the multi-dimensional CSP into its core constituent dimensions and to examine their inter-relationships and relationship with CFP, using statistical analysis. Two different vendor data sets were used as samples to understand if proprietary transformations made by vendors affect results. Analysis reveals that differences in factor payoff horizons, difficulties in transforming environmental, social and governance data into composite CSP ratings and the proprietary nature of such transformation could be some of the contributing factors to the ambiguity in establishing the nature of CSP-CFP relationship.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Balasubramaniam, Arun, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nicholas A. Ashford.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/76922

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/76922