Companies that have joined the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) are required to submit a Communication on Progress (COP), which is an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) report, to the UNGC every year. If they fail to do so, they are marked and listed as non-communicating on the UNGC website. Using the event study methodology, this study shows that a company that fails to report to the UNGC is penalized in the financial markets with an average cumulative abnormal return of −1.6% over a period of 5 trading days around the event. Although a major critique against the UNGC is that the initiative’s voluntary nature and its lack of external monitoring and sanction mechanisms render it ineffective in terms of the business participants’ implementation of the UNGC principles into their operations, this result suggests that investors may be able to pressure UNGC business participants to increase their compliance with the UNGC requirements and to “walk the talk.”
A growing literature investigates how activists launch attacks against firms to improve environmental practices, a situation typically referred to as ‘private politics’. Whether firms self-regulate in response has been shown to depend on reputational risks. However, reputation management in this literature is mostly reactive, whereas firms could be expected to anticipate and prevent reputation loss when faced with the threat of activism. How they would do so is not obvious, nonetheless, because firms have to consider two opposite effects: (1) a ‘reputational damage mitigation’ effect, through which firms can pre-emptively align to what is expected from them, and (2) a ‘target enhancing’ effect, in which self-regulation makes firms more visible and likely to be criticized. We show, theoretically and empirically, that these two effects actually co-exist and create heterogeneity in firms’ responses when they witness activist attacks in their industry. The real impact of activism on the development of more sustainable practices is thus not only greater than if we solely considered the responses of firms that suffer direct attacks, as many firms start self-regulating before being targeted, but also varies within industries.
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