Triangulating Environmental Performance: What Do Corporate Social Responsibility Ratings Really Capture?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The emergence of socially responsible investing has led to the development of a large number of methodologies for rating corporate social responsibility and to a growing body of research exploring the link between environmental and financial performance. Increased availability of information potentially generates an abundance of riches upon which to base investment decisions, but it also raises issues of commensurability, information overload, and confusion. Using a unique data set combining environmental ratings from three leading purveyors, we identify the principal components of corporate environmental performance. We find that two distinct factors—the environmental processes and practices implemented by firms, and the environmental outcomes they generate—explain 80% of the variance of the data. We also find corporate financial performance to be associated to process but not to outcome measures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.057 | 0.290 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".