Disclosure Topics, Financial Relevance, and the Financial Intensity of ESG Materiality

On November 7, 2018, at a ceremony at the London Stock Exchange, the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) announced that its standards had been approved by its Standards Board on October 16, 2018. This announcement capped a seven-year effort to establish measurement and reporting standards for material environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues, standards that are analogous to the financial accounting standards set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). SASB has now identified 91 companies that are using their standards for ESG reporting. This paper analyzes the quality of this reporting.