The Need for Employee Buy-in for ESG to Work

By Kyle Welch and Aaron S. Yoon June 18, 2020 by Kyle Welch

The value and relevance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is an important question because of the increasing popularity of using ESG factors to evaluate investments in companies.

In August 2019, for example, the Business Roundtable, which includes nearly 200 major-company CEOs, released a statement that a corporation’s concerns should go beyond shareholder value and include sustainability and other societal benefits. By 2019, the total assets under management (AUM) of signatories to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment have grown from just a few hundred-billion dollars to more than $90 trillion – almost three times the market capitalization of … Read more

Weak Corporate Culture Creates Risk of Inaccurate Financial Reporting

By Yuan Ji, Oded Rozenbaum and Kyle Welch April 19, 2017 by Kyle Welch

After almost every major financial-reporting scandal, news stories and congressional speeches inevitably follow, detailing how corporate culture encouraged and enabled fraud. For example, in September 2016, Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf testified before the House Financial Services Committee regarding the bank’s phony accounts scandal. The bipartisan outrage was captured by Representative Mike Capuano of Massachusetts: “You… have run an enterprise that has a culture of corruption. You encourage subordinates to abuse existing customers by opening fake bank accounts. You charge those victims illegal fees, interest, and late charges, and then you send some to collection agencies because they didn’t pay

The CLS Blue Sky Blog

Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets

Kyle Welch

Weak Corporate Culture Creates Risk of Inaccurate Financial Reporting