The Influence of Ownership Structure on ESG Ratings

Sammanfattning: The increasing trend towards sustainability within the investment community has motivated this paper to investigate the relationship between ownership structure and ESG rating score. Using data from 735 companies between 2009 and 2018, this paper applies a fixed effects regression to evaluate the influence of ownership type and ownership concentration on the ESG score. The results indicate that the various classes of investors holding shares in a company do have an influence on the level of the ESG score. In particular, it has been found that state ownership does affect the ESG score in a positive way, whereas ownership of institutional investors, corporations and individuals exhibits a negative influence on ESG. Moreover, our analysis suggests that with increasing ownership concentration the ESG score experiences a larger negative impact.