Deceived by ‘S’: Corporate Scandals and ESG

In this paper we study the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings on the likelihood of subsequent corporate scandals. We find that the ‘S’ score (social responsibility) has a predictive power on scandals, while the overall ESG ratings has not. This finding holds for all our specifications. The underlying question that we want to address with this paper is whether the ESG rating agencies are able to establish ratings that reflect firms’ real efforts to act responsibly towards the society, or whether the ratings may contribute to deceiving the audience. Our work contributes to the ongoing ‘aggregate confusion’ discussion amongst ESG scholars, showing that there is little informational content in an aggregate score (as it measures very diverse dimensions). Contrary to our expectation, the ‘S’ score is positively correlated with the likelihood of corporate scandals, suggesting that the ‘S’ score does not live up to measuring a company’s social responsibility, including the ‘commitment to being a good corporate citizen’ (Refinitiv, 2022). Our analysis is based on a hand-collected matched sample of 113 global corporate scandals.