New traits emerge in corporate ESG ranks: CEO age, gender

Study finds younger women CEOs outperform on environmental policies.

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Clockwise from top left: Katharine Keenan, Blackstone Mortgage Trust; Sarah McGinty London, Centene; Angela Aman, Kilroy Realty; Linda Rendle, Clorox; Heidi G. Petz, Sherwin-Williams; Corie Barry, Best Buy.

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(Mark Hulbert, an author and longtime investment columnist, is the founder of the Hulbert Financial Digest; his Hulbert Ratings audits investment newsletter returns.)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — Those wishing to invest in companies doing the most to mitigate climate change would do well to look for firms whose CEOs are young, female and highly educated.

Those are the intriguing implications of a new academic study. The study is titled “CEO Age and Corporate Environmental Policies,” and was conducted by Huong Le of Vietnam National University, Andros Gregoriou of the Liverpool Business School, and Tung Nguyen of Vietnam’s Academy of Policy and Development.

The researchers reached their conclusions upon analyzing the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between 2010 and 2020 of U.S. companies included in the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The researchers also gathered the biographical characteristics of the companies’ CEOs, such as age, gender and years of education. They found that each of these three characteristics was correlated with companies’ GHG emissions.

As we all know, however, correlation is not causation.