UCLA

Disclosure of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics remains almost entirely voluntary, resulting in incomplete and unstandardized data that makes it difficult for stakeholders to collectively compare firms and assess their impact. To align reporting, in 2020 the World Economic Forum (WEF) proposed a framework consisting of metrics it asserted were already commonly used by firms. But little data supports this claim, as there is no comprehensive evaluation on firms’ disclosure rates on these metrics. This project aims to fill this gap. We selected 300 of the largest U.S. public companies from the Fortune 200 and S&P 500 lists because they’re high-revenue firms and have a substantial impact on global social and environmental trajectories. And these firms have more resources to devote to reporting ESG metrics. Under four pillars — Governance, Planet, People, and Prosperity — WEF describes 21 core metrics and 34 expanded metrics. This research focuses on these 300 companies’ disclosure related to the 21 core metrics, many of which have multiple subparts. For this analysis, we divide the 21 core metrics into 74 submetrics. We source data primarily from the text of sustainability reports (54.9%), firms’ websites, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) public filings (37.5%) or the Compustat database, and the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) (7.6%).