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The following is part of a series by our friends at CSRHub (a 3p sponsor) - offering free sustainability and corporate social responsibility ratings on over 5,000 of the world’s largest publicly traded companies. 3p readers get 40% off CSRHub's professional subscriptions with promo code "TP40"
This post is part two of a two part series. Read part one >>
By Bahar Gidwani
We recently published a chart that shows that the CSR performance of the roughly 5,000 companies in the CSRHub database has been remarkably stable over time. In fact, the average overall rating for the past 16 months has stayed between 47.4 and 48.7 on our 0 to 100 scale. (Note that all ratings mentioned here were estimated using our CSRHub average user profile. The results might be slightly different under different user rating profiles.)
Is this stability real or is it an artifact of the way we generate our ratings? We have checked our approach and believe it is real. However, we also believe ratings groups have a responsibility to be transparent about their processes. Therefore, we will share with you some of the details of our analysis.
First, we wondered if we had no change in our average rating, because there was no change in our individual ratings. If all or almost all of our company scores are the same each month, it would be natural for the average to remain unchanged.
Our system contains 70,200 month-to-month rating change pairs (the rating for a company for one month, compared to its rating for the next month). We found that 42 percent of the time, a company’s rating changed by at least 0.1 points. If the distribution of changes was randomly distributed (a “normal” curve), it would have a mean of zero and a standard deviation of 1. However, 1.5 percent of our changes are bigger than three standard deviations (5.2 points) from the mean—much more than the 0.5 percent we would expect if our the changes had only random noise as a source.
Next we wondered if one stable source somehow dominated the others and suppressed a trend. However, no single source of the 140+ sources we use contributes more than 20 percent of the data (after weighting adjustments) in our system. Furthermore, we added both sources and data steadily during this period. The change in the percent each source contributed to our overall data should expose this type of flaw.
(Note the rise especially in governance and employee scores—areas of focus for Chinese companies in general.)
BP
(As expected, there is a steady fall in environment and community scores, as the Gulf spill continues to take its toll.)
Our mission is to give access to broad, stable ratings of sustainability performance to those interested in corporate CSR performance. We appear to have achieved our goal and can only hope that real changes in company performance will eventually drive our average ratings upward.
Bahar Gidwani is a Co-founder and CEO of CSRHub. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City. CSRHub is the preeminent source of aggregated corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information worldwide. We cover nearly 5,000 companies in 135 industries in 65 countries. With an unmatched compilation of data, we provide access to corporate indicators on employee, environment, community, and governance issues. Our 140-plus data sources span across sectors, including six socially responsible investing analysts, as well as leading indexes, NGOs, crowd sources, and government agencies. Our comprehensive analysis informs and empowers businesspeople and activists alike. These are corporate social responsibility ratings to help you change the world.
CSRHub provides access to corporate social responsibility and sustainability ratings and information on nearly 5,000 companies from 135 industries in 65 countries. Managers, researchers and activists use CSRHub to benchmark company performance, learn how stakeholders evaluate company CSR practices and seek ways to change the world.
CSRHub rates 12 indicators of employee, environment, community and governance performance and flags many special issues. We offer subscribers immediate access to millions of detailed data points from our 140-plus data sources. Our data comes from six socially responsible investing firms, well-known indexes, publications, “best of” or “worst of” lists, NGOs, crowd sources and government agencies. By aggregating and normalizing the information from these sources, CSRHub has created a broad, consistent rating system and a searchable database that links each rating point back to its source.
