Are the largest investors not supporting sustainability as commonly thought?

Here’s the abstract from this study by Anne Lafarre in the Netherlands – which buries the lead at the bottom, the “study provides strong empirical evidence that the Big Three are unwilling to openly support sustainability initiatives and downgrades their claims to greenwashing”:

This study investigates how responsible institutional investors really are based on their voting records. It employs the political science model W-Nominate and uses a unique and international dataset containing the latest votes of 133 institutional investors and voting recommendations of ISS and Glass Lewis for a large sample of sustainability proposals.

We also include those voting records on director elections for which institutional investors express sustainability voting rationales to capture those votes that are consequential for the corporate management. The ideal points of institutional investors mapped in a spatial model reveal that there are large differences between these investors. The results show that European investors are more socially responsible than US investors, and US asset owners are more socially responsible than US asset managers.

The study provides strong empirical evidence that the Big Three are unwilling to openly support sustainability initiatives and downgrades their claims to greenwashing.