Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations are ascendant priorities for consumers, policy makers, and corporations. These global ESG megatrends have pecuniary implications for corporate performance. At Causeway, our commitment and approach to ESG are informed by research. We believe that shareholder-friendly corporate governance and sustainable business practices have the potential to contribute positively to a company’s performance over a full market cycle.
Causeway has applied a deliberate approach to integrate ESG in our process. We have provided training to fundamental analysts on ESG issues, built desktop applications to facilitate ESG integration, and instituted accountability for observing integration procedures.
Since becoming a signatory to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2016, Causeway has conducted programmatic research aimed at identifying key ESG issues, developing a structured and evidence-based understanding of those issues, and mapping out and empirically testing their investment implications. Our research examines both traditional and big unstructured data sets, employing state-of-the-art quantitative and statistical learning techniques combined with deep fundamental knowledge of the economic drivers of investment performance. We have developed proprietary ESG scores that predicted returns in a global equity universe, and maintained out-of-sample efficacy, in back tests. To learn more about Causeway research, click on the resources below.
Director of ESG Research
Mozaffar Khan, PhD
Dr. Khan is director of ESG research and a quantitative senior research analyst at Causeway. He joined the firm in April 2017. His current responsibilities include the design, development, and backtesting of new equity return prediction models and signals.
From 2010 to 2017 Dr. Khan held various appointments at the University of Minnesota, most recently as the Honeywell professor of accounting. From 2014 to 2016, Dr. Khan taught in the MBA required curriculum at Harvard Business School where he was the James M. Collins visiting associate professor of business administration. From 2005 to 2010, Dr. Khan was an assistant professor of management at MIT, teaching in the MBA core and elective programs at the Sloan School of Management.
Dr. Khan earned a PhD from the University of Toronto. During his 12-year academic career, Dr. Khan was awarded tenure at two universities (Toronto and Minnesota), served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and published numerous scientific papers in leading academic journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Accounting and Economics, and The Accounting Review.
Read our interview with Mo about forging an alpha-centric approach to ESG.
ESG Resources
webinar / March 2021
A Value Manager's Take On Disruption: ESG At Causeway (Webinar)
Sustainability and corporate responsibility drive consumer, policy, and company priorities, now more than ever before. A discussion of Causeway's approach to ESG considerations.
article / March 2021
Forging an Alpha-Centric Approach to ESG
A discussion of ESG's relation to alpha, incorporating ESG into an investment framework, ways to evaluate managers on ESG, and how the field is evolving.
November 2020
ESG alpha, novel metrics and integration in the investment process
Causeway senior research analyst, Mo Khan, recently appeared on Investment Magazine’s Market Narrative podcast with Alex Proimos to discuss his work on ESG at Causeway.
article / October 2019
Corporate Governance, ESG, and Stock Returns around the World
We constructed governance and ESG metrics that yield statistically and economically significant alpha in a global investable universe. Our research is featured in the CFA Institute's Financial Analysts Journal.