With responsible investments still on the rise, the ESG Equity Barometer, created by the ESG Advisory team at Euronext Corporate Services in collaboration with ValueCo, outlines some key topics in this area identified in H1 2023.
The objective of this bi-annual report is to make responsible investment more concrete for European issuers. Additionally, our team highlights major investment trends and decrypts ESG strategies by focusing on innovative sustainable funds.
According to the study Aggregate Confusion: The Divergence of ESG Ratings led by Florian Berg and his co-authors, the ESG ratings of the five main rating agencies are only 54% correlated on average. The study conducted in this paper aims to examine the links between the scores awarded internally by professional investors (asset managers, private banks and institutional investors) aggregated by ValueCo and those of MSCI and Sustainalytics, two of the world's most influential rating agencies.
Do you want to know how to integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data into business valuation? This book co-written by ValueCo’s co-founder Mathieu Joubrel along with other practitioners and academics will help you do so.
The book primarily aims at reaching two types of audiences: practitioners and students in finance (graduate and undergraduate level). Practitioners in finance will find interest in the book, as it will give them access to academic knowledge in a format that suits them. Academic research has made substantial advances in the field of business valuation and ESG. The book intends to transform this knowledge into practical and rigorous methodologies for taking ESG into account when valuing a company.
Readers without prior knowledge of business valuation will be guided through the ESG integration process. They will first be introduced to the concept of value and the reasons for incorporating ESG into the value. They will then learn simple financial methods to value firms and see step-by-step use cases. For instance, the reader will learn how to value a firm in the renewable energy sector using cash flow and multiple valuation methods. After building knowledge of standard business valuation, readers will better understand ESG data and ratings. The reader will then learn how to integrate ESG into business valuation using cash flow and multiples approaches. Again, the reader will be able to replicate these methods as the book will provide practical cases for integrating ESG data in business valuation. Finally, for the readers that intend to go a bit further, they will learn about the academic research advances in ESG and business valuation.
ABN AMRO and ValueCo teamed up to analyse how the broad credit bond market takes notice of investors' ESG opinions. We find a statistically significant link with CDS spread, but still many market inefficiencies at the issuer level.
This paper highlights the ESG market view of a spectrum of European Global Systemically Important Banks. This sneak peek paves the way for the extensive insights set to debut in the upcoming ESG Strategist publication series.
The target of this white paper is to present a methodology allowing fund selectors to standardize and automatize ESG due diligence on funds while taking into account their internal ESG policies and performance. Unlike tools like Morningstar, which rate funds based on an ESG framework taken as a reference (namely, that of Sustainalytics), the process we present is designed to assess the affinity between a fund selector and an asset manager based on their own ESG convictions.
This paper investigates bias detection methods for ESG scoring models. We show how to assess and quantify the model biases both relatively to a group of peers and in absolute value. We separate endogenous bias factors used as input in the model which can be modified by analysts, and exogenous factors such as the company size, activity sector, and main geographical area. We propose a methodology to mitigate these biases and compute a score that is independent of the chosen factors. Finally, we propose a framework to detect the companies whose intrinsic performances outperform their peers independently of the exogenous biases of the model.
Mathieu Joubrel, co-founder of ValueCo, was awarded the FIR-PRI Award for Sustainable Finance and the Award for Impact Research by Environmental Finance for this article.
