World-Class Hub for Sustainability
We are incredibly proud to announce that Professors Roni Michaely (The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Business and Economics), Joan Farre-Mensa (University of Illinois at Chicago), and Martin Schmalz (University of Oxford) have been awarded the prestigious Sharpe Award for the Best Paper published in the 2025 Volume of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis (JFQA)
When institutional investors cast their votes against company directors, they increasingly do something that was once rare: they explain why. These “voting rationales” — brief written explanations accompanying dissenting votes — are emerging as a surprisingly effective tool for driving corporate governance reform, according to new research analyzing nearly 800,000 such disclosures.
Do Environmental and Social funds vote the way they talk? Do they walk the walk or only talk the talk? Every year, around March-April, asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard or Fidelity vote on behalf of their millions of funds investors in thousands of proposals at their portfolio companies. In recent years, their votes on environmental and social proposals have taken the spotlight. Indeed, the extent to which these managers support environmental and social proposals is an important factor in the debate concerning the impact of institutional investors on firms’ attitudes towards ES issues. It is equally relevant to efforts by the SEC and other regulatory agencies to encourage institutional engagement and tackle concerns over greenwashing.