The Market for ESG Ratings

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Azarmsa, Ehsan; Shapiro, Joel
• 署名单位: University of Illinois System; University of Illinois Chicago; University of Illinois Chicago Hospital; University of Oxford
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF FINANCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1082; 1540-6261
• DOI: 10.1111/jofi.70078
• 发表日期: 2026-08-25
• 关键词: information

摘要

We present a model of competition between environmental, social, and governance (ESG) raters who acquire information about multiple unrelated categories and sell ratings. Raters specializing in different categories maximize the amount of information transmitted and surplus, and can be an equilibrium outcome. When investors place a high value on ESG performance across multiple categories, the unique equilibrium is for the raters to generalize-splitting their effort among the categories, resulting in less informative ratings. Greenwashing by firms can make generalization the only equilibrium. We also demonstrate that specialization maximizes ratings disagreement, and thus empirical measures of disagreement may be poor measures of surplus.