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In a recently released study by MSCI, findings indicate that not only do strong ESG ratings add to a company's share value, but the ebbs and flows of ESG ratings have a direct "causal" impact on the company's stock price.
"How Markets Price ESG," is the second study on this topic, but this time taking it a step further, says the study's author, Guido Giese, MSCI director of Applied Equity Research. Giese says that in their 2017 study, they clearly found that ESG ratings were a "descriptor of risk."
Although the assumption from there was that a change of rating would impact the stock price, the second study was done to determine if that assumption was correct.
"The economic logic was there but what was surprising was how it worked out," Giese told ThinkAdvisor. "We did also study controlling for other factors, so trying to understand maybe another factor explained the change in stock price, but there wasn't; so no other factor in our risk model could explain why ESG rating upgrades have outperformed ESG downgrades. Surprising how clear the results were in the end."
