Which shareholders are interested in the ESG-indicators of the company?

Today Russian companies have a low level of compliance with the principles of sustainable economy, which can be largely determined by a weak interest of some corporate stakeholders to ESG (environmental, social and governance) indicators. It determines the relevance of studying the individual groups of stakeholders and determine the measure of their interest in ESG-strategy.

The purpose of this work is to determine which shareholders are most interested in ESG indicators of companies whose securities are traded on the Russian stock market. The research is based on the data from Yahoo Finance and the website of the Sustainalytics, Inc. company as of the end of 2021.

Cluster, variance, regression and correlation analyses were carried out and methods of descriptive statistics were used.

Results of this work have revealed the presence of the features of ownership structure of Russian companies in comparison with companies of developed countries. The lack of insiders’ interest in corporate ESG characteristics has been confirmed. At the same time, the increase in the share of institutional shareholders leads to decrease in the assessed risk of ESG but its rate is less than the change in the shares of institutional owners. The different importance of individual components of the ESG assessment for institutional shareholders has been noted.

The novelty of this research is the study of Russian investors and issuers that have not been systematically studied before as well as the ascertainment of complex influence of insiders/outsiders and institutional/private investors. The scientific significance is determined by the development of a new approach to study the influence of the degree of investor responsibility on corporate characteristics. The practical significance of the results lies in obtaining the possibility of developing targeted incentive tools for company shareholders to increase their interest in corporate ESG-indicators and to increase the sustainability of the company and territories. This research will be of interest to investors, company managers, authorities, non-profit organizations and specialists in the field of ESG investment.

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