The upcoming TILEC Work In Progress on 09 March 2022 is by Dr. Anne Lafarre on 'Do Institutional Investors Vote Responsibly?'

The study 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.

Dr. Anne Lafarre is Associate Professor at the Private, Business and Labour Law at Tilburg Law School, Tilburg University. She also teaches at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science in 's-Hertogenbosch, and is the Program Director of a Joint Data Science Bachelor's programme in Tilburg together with the Eindhoven University of Technology. She holds a cum laude master's degree in Economics and in Law. Her PhD in 2017 at Tilburg University, which was awarded cum laude, concerned comparative-legal and econometric analyses of shareholder (voting) behaviour in the Annual General Meeting of shareholders (AGM). She works mainly in the field of corporate governance, corporate sustainability, and shareholder engagement.

• Link to Paper: https://lnkd.in/eYWyCj8f
• Time: 1045-1145h
• Location: Hybrid: Room M1001, Montesquieu Building (M building) and Zoom meeting
• Register here: https://lnkd.in/evi2TZ7u