How Much Do ESG Ratings Matter to Investors?

One popular criticism of ESG research and ratings focuses on the “inconsistent” views of ESG research providers. To investigate how meaningful company-level ESG ratings divergence is to investors, we compared the Morningstar Sustainability Indexes, which are powered by Sustainalytics’ company-level ESG Risk Ratings and research, to their MSCI equivalents.

Share this page

What's Inside

An overview of how the Sustainalytics ESG Risk Ratings assess firms’ exposure to – and management of – financially material ESG risks
Company-specific examples of how risk ratings from Sustainalytics and MSCI can differ, and how those differences impact index eligibility
Holdings and performance-based comparisons of select ESG-focused equity and bond indexes from the Morningstar Sustainability Indexes family to peers that incorporate ESG research from MSCI

Get the Report

Transparency is our policy. Learn how it impacts everything we do.

Transparency is how we protect the integrity of our work and keep empowering investors to achieve their goals and dreams. And we have unwavering standards for how we keep that integrity intact, from our research and data to our policies on content and your personal data.

We’d like to share more about how we work and what drives our day-to-day business.

How we make money

We sell different types of products and services to both investment professionals and individual investors. These products and services are usually sold through license agreements or subscriptions. Our investment management business generates asset-based fees, which are calculated as a percentage of assets under management. We also sell both admissions and sponsorship packages for our investment conferences and advertising on our websites and newsletters.

How we use your personal data

How we use your information depends on the product and service that you use and your relationship with us. We may use it to:

Verify your identity, personalize the content you receive, or create and administer your account.
Provide specific products and services to you, such as portfolio management or data aggregation.
Develop and improve features of our offerings.
Gear advertisements and other marketing efforts towards your interests.

To learn more about how we handle and protect your data, visit our privacy center.

How we approach editorial content

Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investor’s point of view. We also respect individual opinions––they represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.