CSRHub Research

This past year of social and environment pressures (Covid-19, racism inequity, climate change, global risks) has created a new wave of demand for ESG data and insight.

Do bigger companies get better ESG ratings than small ones? We believe the answer is “no.” This seems true across a wide range of companies, whether one measures size by revenue or by market capitalization (a proxy for enterprise value). Our result indicates that small companies can and should expect to be able to equal or outperform their bigger rivals on environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues.

We recently reviewed the ESG coverage status for the 8,686 companies in the MSCI ACWI (All Country World Index). The ACWI is a popular benchmark for many investors, because it includes approximately 85% of the global opportunities for equity investment. We felt it would be useful to see how much ESG information is currently available on the companies on this type of broad index.

Two years ago, the sustainability business community elected me to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Stakeholder Council (SC). Thank you, it has been an honor to represent you. I recently traveled to Amsterdam to attend the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Council. I thought our readers might like to hear some of what we discussed and learned.

CSRHub’s ratings incorporate the input of virtually every major source of opinion about how companies treat environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Our patented methodology weights and combines these opinions in a way that makes them comparable both between companies and over time.

In 2008 CSRHub began measuring performance in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using ten years of history, we are now starting to answer questions such as:

Each year our friends at Corporate Knights pull together a list of the 100 most sustainable corporations in the world. They base their assessment on an extensive analysis of the companies they study that includes a review of numerous facts and figures. CSRHub’s aggregation engine strives to determine a consensus of the perceived sustainability performance for the 17,000 companies we track by combining input from 500 different sources. It is satisfying to see that Corporate Knights’ more direct measurement and analysis approach aligns well with our methodology. Every one of the 100 companies on the Global 100 list had above average CSRHub ratings and the average overall rank was just below the 90th percentile.

Brand Finance has recently released its analysis of the brand strength for the world’s 500 top banks. This annual review uses Brand Finance’s royalty relief methodology to estimate how much of a bank’s market value derives from its brand assets.

We have coined the phrase “Dark Data,” to describe information on corporate sustainability that exists, but cannot normally be seen and evaluated. Dark Data is exchanged privately as part of supply chain, certification, and regulatory interactions. As such, it forms an important part of how companies interact with their environment.