Board Background, ESG Engagement, and Asset Prices

利益相关者和社会越来越多地要求公司将环境、社会和治理(ESG)目标纳入其决策。为了实现这些目标，董事会成员应在这些问题上拥有足够的专业知识。本研究的目的是考察董事会成员的ESG背景(包括教育和工作经验)如何影响企业的ESG敬业度，以及在正常和危机时期，特别是在新冠肺炎爆发后，业务结果和股市对此有何反应。该项目旨在使用机器学习来构建一种新的衡量公司ESG参与度的方法，基于各种公司/监管披露信息，包括来自多个新来源的收益电话、10-K和SEC评议信。该项目从以下几个方面为文献贡献：(I)董事会成员背景与公司ESG参与度之间的关系很少被探讨。了解这种关系不仅对股东和投资者至关重要，而且对出于监管目的的政策制定者来说也是至关重要的，本研究旨在提供这方面的第一证据；(Ii)研究提出了一种使用机器学习和文本挖掘中的新技术来衡量公司ESG参与度的新指标，该指标可以从投资者和监管者的角度捕捉到公司披露的自我报告问题。总体而言，该项目旨在提供证据，对股东、投资者和监管者产生影响，以更有效地支持公司对ESG政策的承诺，并更好地衡量ESG参与度，以促进社会的可持续发展和增长。

Companies are increasingly required by its stakeholders and society to incorporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals into its decision making. To achieve these goals, board members are expected to have adequate expertise on these subjects. The objective of this study is to examine how the ESG background of board members including education and work experience affects firms' ESG engagement, and how business outcome and the stock market react to this during normal and crisis periods, especially after the outbreak of COVID-19. This project aims to construct a new measure of firms' ESG engagement using machine learning, based on a variety of corporate/regulatory disclosures including earnings calls, 10-Ks and SEC comment letters from multiple novel sources.The project contributes to the literature in the following ways:(i) the relationship between board members' background and firms' ESG engagement is rarely explored. Understanding this relationship is crucial not only for shareholders and investors, but also for policymakers for the purpose of regulation, and the study aims to provide the first evidence on this; (ii) the study proposes a new measure of firms' ESG engagement using new techniques in machine learning and text mining, which can capture the perspectives from both investors and regulators and potentially address the self-reporting issue from firm disclosures.Overall, the project aims to provide evidence that has implications for shareholders, investors and regulators to more effectively support firms' undertaking of ESG policies and to better measure ESG engagement to promote sustainable development and growth for society.