2023-06-15
54 分钟Probably not. The economist Kelly Shue argues that E.S.G. investing just gives more money to firms that are already green while depriving polluting firms of the financing they need to get greener. But she has a solution.
Before we start today's episode, an announcement, a birth announcement, there is a new weekly show in the Freakonomics Radio network, a show I think you will love.
In fact, we know a lot of you already love it because we put out a few pilot episodes earlier this year and the response was strong.
The show is called the Economics of everyday things, and it's hosted by Zachary Crockett.
You can get it right now in your podcast app.
So go do that.
Just look up the economics of everyday things and follow or subscribe for free to hear a sample.
Just stick around to the end of this episode.
And now here's this week's episode of Free Economics Radio.
My name is Kelly Hsu.
I'm a professor of finance at the Yale School of Management.
Some professors want to spend all their time on research.
Shu does plenty of research, but she also does a lot of classroom teaching, and she likes her students.
I get a lot of research ideas from talking to them and a lot of insights about how the real world differs from what I'm teaching in class.
So I like it when they push back and they say what you're teaching me is unrealistic because that's not how we do it in a firm.
But sometimes it's the students who Shu thinks are unrealistic.
That's where she got the idea for a new paper.
I was inspired to work on this paper because I was actually just quite annoyed by an argument that I had heard frequently by some of my MBA students about how ESG investing is supposed to make the world more green.
ESG stands for environmental, social, and governance.
And ESG investing is about allocating resources in a way that makes money while also improving the world.
When Xu heard people explaining how it was supposed to work, she couldn't make the math add up.