In 2016, Norges Bank Investment Management initiated a research project with Professor George Serafeim at Harvard Business School to analyse sustainability disclosure and company performance.
The research is based on the fund’s datasets on corporate disclosures on climate change, water management and children’s rights. The purpose of this project is to better understand the potential value relevance of non-financial data and inform future developments in corporate non-financial disclosures for improved measurement of sustainability performance.
The project modelled the determinants of the disclosure scores and then looked at relationships between sustainability information and financial performance. This empirical analysis highlights differences between disclosures that capture actual performance, versus metrics that capture disclosures of efforts. The research report was finalised by Professor Serafeim and Jody Grewal and published this month.
Our ambition is that this empirical analysis can contribute to existing knowledge in this area, and establish a basis for more academic research.