CSRHub Blog Research on ESG metrics and comments on sustainability best practice

CSRHub CTO and Co-Founder, Bahar Gidwani, will be speaking at the 2020 BattleFin Ensemble & Discovery Days event. The conference will take place virtually September 29th - 30th, 2020.  

BattleFin's panel lineup is broad and current, including discussions on the recovery of the travel industry, tech and consumer stock insights, macroeconomic trends, and even a panel focusing on the current election. 

The two-day conference aims to use alternative data insights to predict some of the changing impacts Covid-19 will have on Q3 earnings.

Bahar will take part in a roundtable discussion on the Institutional Investor's Perspective sponsored by AWS on Tuesday at 11:35am ET alongside executives from:

• Sentieo - Financial Research for a Market Edge
• American Century Investments - Leading Asset Management Firm
• Worldwide World Pensions Council - The Asset Owners' Think Tank

For the full agenda, a complete list of speakers, and the opportunity to register, click here.

Bahar Gidwani has built and run large technology-based businesses for many years. Bahar holds a CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) and was one of the first people to receive the FSA (Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting) designation from SASB. Bahar worked on Wall Street with Kidder, Peabody, and with McKinsey & Co. He has founded several technology-based companies and is a co-founder of CSRHub, the world’s broadest source of corporate social responsibility information. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy. He plays bridge, races sailboats, and is based in New York City.

CSRHub offers one of the world’s broadest and most consistent set of Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings, covering 20,000 companies. Its Big Data algorithm combines millions of data points on ESG performance from hundreds of sources, including leading ESG analyst raters, to produce consensus scores on all aspects of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. CSRHub ratings can be used to drive corporate, investor and consumer decisions. For more information, visit www.CSRHub.com. CSRHub is a B Corporation.

By Bahar Gidwani

The term “impulse control” describes how some people are able to delay the gratification of their desires, and resist temptation.  The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out a good study by Fuld & Co. that describes how various groups of corporate managers reacted when faced with an ethical decision.  I’ll let you read the details for yourself.  What interested me was that Fuld & Co. measured (and contrasted) the level of ethical self-control exhibited in different industries.

As you can guess, we can also do a by-industry investigation of ethical behavior patterns with our 5,000-company dataset.  We have two ratings that relate directly to ethics and impulse control—a subcategory called “Leadership Ethics” and one called “Training Health, & Safety.”

The Fuld & Co. study reported that healthcare and pharmaceutical managers had the highest ethical standards, followed by government and education, manufacturing, technology, and financial and business services.

Our ratings are quite different.  We give our highest scores among the industries they mention to the services area for both leadership ethics and on the training issues that should drive employee behavior.  Our lowest scores go to the manufacturing area—especially durable goods manufacturing.

Of course, there is an apples to oranges element to these comparisons.  Fuld & Co. got its answers directly from the responses of senior executives.  Our data comes from the opinions of thousands of outsiders who follow the companies we rate.  Fuld & Co. studied 104 companies--most based in the US.  We track about 5,000 and about half are non-US.

There is also a contrast in the way Fuld & Co. set up its survey.  They asked their subjects a hypothetical question—one that could be seen as a test of their aggressiveness or competitiveness.  In this context, many business people may be tempted (encouraged?) to lean towards a less fundamentally ethical action.  However, when faced with a real world decision—or when asked to provide leadership and direction to the employees who work for them—managers may damp down their hormones and control those bad impulses.

Notice that some of the industries that Fuld & Co. identified as less ethical seem to have better training scores in our system? Perhaps these industries have already realized that managers in their businesses need help with impulse control.  We’ll try to get more details on this study and get more answers to the questions it raises.

Bahar Gidwani is a Cofounder and CEO of CSRHUB. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor Web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City.