Shareholder Activism On Climate Change: Evidence From Shareholder Resolutions Filed Against Canadian Oil, Gas, Utility And Pipeline Companies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shareholders play an important role in corporate governance and are increasingly concerned about the impacts of climate change. This paper examines shareholder activism – in the form of shareholder resolutions – on climate change and how companies disclose climate change-related information. I compile shareholder resolutions on Canadian oil, gas, utility and pipeline companies from 1987-2018 and how investors voted on those resolutions. I also examine climate change-related corporate disclosure from 2013-2017. Climate change received the greatest number of shareholder resolutions, many of which asked for disclosure and focussed on carbon asset risk. Larger companies were targeted and resolutions were filed by environmental, social and governance funds, faith-based organizations and financial institutions. The response of institutional investors to these resolutions has varied. Standardization of corporate social responsibility reports using the Global Reporting Initiative has fallen over the reporting period, although CDP scores remain consistent. My study provides recommendations for better disclosure practices.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".