Steering Sustainability: Empirical Insights Into Enhancing ESG Ratings via CSR Committees

This study contributes to the ongoing discussion on the increasing importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) committees and their characteristics in driving a stronger focus on sustainability. Using ESG and financial data from Refinitiv/Datastream, governance information from BoardEx, and country-level indicators from Eurostat, we examine a panel of 2202 listed non-financial firms from 11 G20 countries over the period 2010–2021, resulting in 16,505 firm-year observations. Our findings confirm that board size, board gender diversity, and the proportion of independent directors have a positive impact on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Moreover, we show that both the presence of a CSR committee and the proportion of independent directors on that committee positively influence a company's ESG performance scores. Furthermore, our study indicates that having a CFO on a CSR committee is associated with fewer ESG controversies. Additional analyses explore heterogeneity across countries and sectors, showing that the effectiveness of CSR committees varies depending on institutional and industry contexts. From a policy perspective, the findings suggest that regulators, governance code setters, and ESG rating agencies should pay greater attention not only to the existence of CSR committees, but also to their composition, particularly committee independence and CFO involvement, when evaluating firms' sustainability governance.