Do Employees Have Useful Information About Firms’ ESG Practices?

The author appreciates the helpful comments and suggestions from Will Cong (editor), the associate editor, and three referees, as well as Rui Albuquerque, Nick Bloom, Wenzhi Ding, Rodolphe Durand, Alex Edmans, Isil Erel, Kornelia Fabisik, Andrei Goncalves, Isaac Hacamo, Gerard Hoberg (discussant), Mark Huson, Julian Koelbel, Kai Li (discussant), Ming Li (discussant), Wayne Li (discussant), Mehdi Lehlali (discussant), Victor Lyonnet, Xinjie Ma, Jean-Stéphane Mésonnier (discussant), Aneesh Raghunandan, Zach Sautner (discussant), Amin Shams, René Stulz, Long Tran, Ly Tran, John Van Reenen, Petra Vokata, Daisy Wang, Michael Weisbach, Michael Wittry, Qiping Xu, Yuyang Zhang (discussant); seminar participants at Cornell University, Georgia State University, Ohio State University, Michigan State University, University of Kentucky, University of Warwick, University of Alberta, Auburn University, University of Illinois Chicago, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the BlackRock Applied Research Award, PanAgora Asset Management, ACTalk series, and Corporate Misconduct Seminar; and conference participants at NFA, CICF, Stanford Empirical Management Conference, ECGI & University of Delaware Corporate Governance Symposium, USC Marshall PhD Conference, UT-Austin PhD Symposium, HEC-HKUST Sustainable Finance Workshop, ABFER, ARCS, GRASFI, AFBC, Nova Finance PhD Countdown, CSFN, and SoFiE Summer School. The author thanks Bernadette Minton for access to the Ohio Supercomputer, Jun-Koo Kang for sharing the list of cyber-attacks, and the University of Alberta for funding support with some data sets. This paper was previously circulated with the title “An Inside View of Corporate ESG Practices.” This project benefits from funding from the University of Alberta and Monash University. These are internal funding sources provided as part of faculty research support, and there are no associated grant numbers.