ABOUT
sristudies.org is a resource for academic researchers, investment professionals, and other people interested in the quantitative aspects of responsible investment. This site includes notes and citations on research papers in the related fields of corporate social responsibility, responsible investment, and ESG from the 1970s to the present. The focus is primary on empirical studies.
This started as a personal project in the late 1990s. The idea was to have an online notebook of substantive material for my own use and for the benefit of the (few) researchers who had an interest in these topics. As academic interest intensified following the financial crisis, the volume of studies exploded and the project outran my ability to sustain it; sristudies.org essentially went on hiatus. I continued to collect citations and make occasional notes, however, and in 2019-20 I updated the content and re-established the site on a new platform.
The core material is an unevenly annotated bibliography (here) of 500+ academic studies I've thought relevant to the practice of responsible investment. A citation is provided for each one and, as often as possible, an external link so users can find the relevant item online. In most cases I do not include the full authors' abstract, but I try to provide an excerpt or my own summary.
The site also has some commentary from me, including lists of studies on various topics that I believe merit your closest attention (here), and a very incomplete page on theoretical works that might be of interest (here).
Three caveats:
sristudies.org is updated occasionally.
The notes on the papers are often done in haste. If I see a working paper and take notes on it, I may or may not see the final version, and may or may not update the citation here.
This list of papers is by no means exhaustive. I believe the largest academic database is the CalPERS Sustainable Investment Research Initiative Library (link), but at last check (October 2023) it appears to only have studies dated 2016 or earlier. For a more complete picture of the literature and how it has evolved I suggest that you look at these literature reviews:
Orlitzky, Schmidt, and Rynes' 2003 meta-analysis of the literature of corporate social responsibility. This was the first meta-analysis in the field, and has a very useful explanation of the methodology. - link
Margolis, Elfenbein, and Walsh's 2009 meta-analysis of corporate social responsibility studies - link
My 2013 book, Looking Forward, Looking Back, which selectively covered the literature up until the financial crisis - link
Revelli and Viviani's 2015 meta-analysis - link
Clark, Feiner, and Viehs' 2015 meta-analysis - link
Friede, Busch, and Bassen's 2015 meta-analysis - link
Whelan, Atz, Van Holt, and Clark’s 2021 meta-analysis covering the 2015-2020 time period (over 1,000 studies) - link
Good reading!
- Lloyd Kurtz