Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance (YISF)

By identifying the different types of investors and their sustainability needs and investment strategies, our team observed that ESG data rarely provides what mainstream investors want. This research stream explores how ESG metrics might be recast to meet the needs of a range of sustainability-minded investors – and how the methodologies for sustainability reporting might be streamlined and made more clear and consistent.

The Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance hosts an annual symposium of experts to discuss the burning challenges to ESG disclosure.

The Yale Symposium on Sustainable Finance and ESG Disclosure 2018 will focus on the State of Standards on ESG Disclosure. This Symposium will bring together leading scholars and practitioners from the world of sustainable finance and investing to review and discuss the latest trends in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics and data. The Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance will partner with the peer-reviewed journal Organization & Environment to present cutting-edge research on the State and Directions of ESG Disclosure Standards. Selected papers will be presented during the Symposium and published in the Symposium Proceedings — and the top-rated papers will be recommended for submission to a special issue of the journal Organization & Environment.

The Symposium will take place  on November 2, 2018 at the Yale School of Management, New Haven, Connecticut. 

The Yale Symposium on Sustainable Finance and ESG Disclosure 2017 focused on the question of the State of ESG Metrics. The selected articles have been published in the Journal of Environmental Investing volume 8.  

This research stream builds on the Esty-Cort research paper entitled "Corporate Sustainability Metrics: What Investors Need and Don't Get", recently published in the Journal of Environmental Investing, and its analytical framework for the methodological weaknesses in current ESG metrics.

We explored whether companies provide sufficient information on stakeholders' well-being in their sustainability disclosure in the paper authored by Diane Strauss entitled "The State of Corporate Disclosure on Well-being: A Review of Corporate Reporting Practices in the Food and Agriculture Sector in 2018" to be published by the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD). This research piece was selected for presentation in the OECD World Forum on November 27-28 in Incheon, Korea.

We are currenly exploring whether and how artificial intelligence and machine learning may serve ESG analytics. This one year project rigorously analyses the potential of the technology in answering burning questions of sustainable finance.