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。为实现这些目标，董事会成员应具备这些方面的足够专业知识。本研究旨在探讨董事会成员的环境、社会及管治背景（包括教育及工作经验）如何影响公司的环境、社会及管治参与，以及在正常及危机期间（尤其是COVID-19爆发后），业务成果及股市对此的反应。本项目旨在通过机器学习构建一种新的衡量企业ESG参与度的方法，该方法基于来自多个新来源的各种公司/监管披露，包括财报电话会议、10-Ks和SEC评论信。本项目在以下方面对文献做出了贡献：（i）董事会成员背景与企业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，而且对政策制定者进行监管也至关重要，本研究旨在提供这方面的第一个证据;（ii）该研究提出了一种新的衡量企业ESG参与度的方法，该方法使用了机器学习和文本挖掘的新技术，这可以捕捉到投资者和监管机构的观点，并可能解决公司披露的自我报告问题。总体而言，该项目旨在提供对股东、投资者和监管机构有影响的证据，以更有效地支持公司实施ESG政策，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.