School of Business and Management Department of Finance 183 Institutional Investors and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Preferences Supervisor: YEGEN Eyub / FINA Student: CHOW Wing Shan / ECOF Course: UROP1100, Fall Traditionally, environment, society and governance (ESG) issues were not the first priority to the investors. However, in recent years, more and more investment strategies incorporate ESG considerations. The ultimate goal of the project is to examine whether certain types of institutional investors, ranging from mutual funds to endowments, have specific preferences to ESG practice. We studied 5,500 ESG-related shareholder proposals in the proxy statements, which were provided by the U.S. listed companies regulated by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We identified the main ESG areas that institutional investors proposed, and the responses from the Broad of directors. We were interested to understand the correlation between institutional investors and ESG preferences, as well as how the management level of the public corporations incorporates the ESG considerations suggested by the investors. Institutional Investors and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Preferences Supervisor: YEGEN Eyub / FINA Student: GU Zhaoyi / QFIN QIAO Yanliu / QFIN Course: UROP1100, Spring UROP1100, Spring In this report, we are primarily concerned with the ESG investment preferences of two financial institutions: BlackRock and Fidelity. Our research methodology consists mostly of case studies, qualitative readings of corporate reports, and quantitative analysis of publicly available data. We discovered that both BlackRock and Fidelity are interested in the Asia Pacific market. Furthermore, BlackRock has done the best in the stewardship engagement, with its emphasis on strategy's materiality and transparency and quantitative ESG metrics including decarbonization, diversity, independence, and etc. Fidelity, on the other hand, has been actively involved with firms that are working to eliminate modern slavery and promote clean energy. Institutional Investors and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Preferences Supervisor: YEGEN Eyub / FINA Student: LAM Wai Wang / FINA Course: UROP1100, Fall Nowadays, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) is no longer just an ethical issue, but it also becomes one of the key factors being considered by the institutional investors. In fact, ESG issues, particularly the environmental concerns, have been gaining more and more attention around the globe because of the extreme weather events induced by the climate change. On the other hand, the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations also arouse investors’ interests in the sustainability behaviours of the companies they invest in. However, these judgement could be just noise without statistical support. In this research, Close to 1,200 Shareholders proposals proposed by the institutional investors that are related to ESG issues would be studied to understand their preferences in different ESG fields of the corporates.
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