Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Download or read book Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) written by Ruoke Yang and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My findings point to a world in which the ratings business is primarily catering to a large group of trusting investors who buy ratings not for the value of information but for the value of institutional certification. The third essay examines the ratings of a recently emerged rating agency competitor and find its ratings are of no better predictive quality. I introduce a novel set of measures, `corporate badness (CB) ratings', for corporate environmental and social performance. In contrast to the leading commercial ratings, worse CB ratings correctly predict more future corporate bad behavior out-of-sample. These CB ratings provide a way to study ratings disagreement, which can be used to disentangle greenwashing from the other information contained in the leading commercial CSR ratings.