Historical Origins 历史渊源
Early initiatives to encourage socially responsible investing targeted offending products like guns, tobacco, pornography, or bad practices like environmental degradation and human rights abuses. Investors would simply avoid buying such company stocks. Many of these investors took their cue from religious orders like the Quakers, the Methodists, or Muslims many of whom had longstanding prohibitions on investments in businesses associated with slavery, weapons, or alcohol. 一开始信教的不允许干这些坏事儿（破坏环境、枪、烟草、黄、滥用人权）大家不买他们的股票。
An early example in the genre was the Pioneer Group, a mutual fund founded in 1928 that excluded companies involved in tobacco, alcohol, and gambling. In the wake of the 1970s campaigns against the South African apartheid（种族隔离制度） and against the Vietnam War, financial institutions began to offer portfolios that emitted not just companies in the traditional sense sectors but also companies operating in South Africa where companies contracting with US Defense Department. 最早1928年有个先锋团的混合基金会不投资烟、酒和赌博。20世纪70年代，为支持反南非种族隔离制度和反越战运动，金融机构的投资组合不仅考虑传统部分，而且考虑南非跟美国国防部签合同的公司。
Examples included the Pax World Fund launched in 1971, the first spectrum fund launched in the same year at the Dreyfus third century Fund which launched in 1972. Investors in these funds were motivated more by ethical principles than by the prospect of the risk-adjusted return and perhaps just as well since researchers found that exclusionary strategies such as these funds pursued either mirror the market or they slightly underperform the market. 例子（Pax World Fund Dreyfus third century Fund）这些基金的投资者更多地是出于道德原则，而不是出于对风险调整后回报的预期。也就是说，赚不赚钱都行，但是不能干违背伦理道德的事儿。
There may be some financial benefits in the form of lower risk particularly during crises although such outcomes weren't the intention of the portfolio being constructed. These investors' impact on corporate behavior was also limited, and in fact, a growing body of theoretical and empirical research has challenged the idea that excluding companies from a portfolio or divesting is effective as a lever for impact. （排除法的效果受到质疑）
Researchers have found that only a handful of offending companies and industries have ever changed their practices and response to the actions of early divestment. Some studies have demonstrated no meaningful effect from divestment in terms of ESG scores or CEO turnover. The arguments supporting this lack of a finding is that the link between divestment and corporate decision-making argued to be via the cost of capital is too distant and that uncoordinated divestment is unlikely to affect a company's stock prices especially because this practice largely involves a transfer of ownership of the company from owners who care about the ESG issue to owners who care less. Also, as index investing where an asset manager holds every stock in an index like the S&P 500 has grown more popular, divestment has become less feasible for many asset managers who simply have to hold a share in each company of the index.这种撤资只影响了违法的公司，对其他公司影响不大， CEO如果换成不关心ESG的人，更是不会care他家的ESG表现。 特别是，S&P 500指数出现以后，大家手里的公司关乎整体收益，撤资更是不现实。（S&P500 概念百度后了解了，但是这为什么会影响大家撤资，我还是不太理解）
A powerful theoretical argument against divestment was put forth by Nobel lawyer Oliver Hart of Harvard University and Luigi Zingales at the University of Chicago. Both clearly developed logical arguments and pros and mathematical proofs, the authors offer a radical message. Companies should care not only about maximizing their share price but also pursuing policies that are consistent with the preferences of their investors even preferences relating to ESG factors. The radicalism stems（激进主义根源在于） not just from the message but also from the messengers, the author's employers, the Harvard Economics Department, and the Chicago finance department are better known for defending shareholder primacy（芝加哥财务部以捍卫股东至上而闻名） and Milton Friedman's perspective than appending（附加） it in support of Ed Freeman's stakeholder view. （Hart和Luigi反对撤资，并提出有力证据）
Hart and Zingales were attacking the dictum of Milton Friedman perhaps the best-known champion of laissez-faire economics（自由放任经济学） since Adam Smith that public companies' sole aim should be to maximize the value of their shares. Hart and Zingales argued instead that Milton Friedman and his acolytes ignored what shareholders demonstrated every day with their actions and with their money. Hart and Zingale's argument goes as follows, the ultimate shareholders of a company either institutional investors or those who invest in those institutions are ordinary people who in their daily lives are concerned about money but not just about money. They have ethical and social concerns, for example, some people buy an electric car rather than a gas guzzler because that person cares about pollution or cares about global warming. If customers and owners of companies take social factors into account in their day-to-day decisions shouldn't they want the public companies they invest in to do the same? 有两个教授主张考虑股东的想法，无论是投资机构还是个人投资者，都会有希望世界更美好的愿望，除了股票价格上涨，公司管理者还应考虑到股东们对可持续发展的期待。
Critics of ESG investing had typically argued that corporate shareholders could use the gains from their investments to support environmental and social groups they favored but Hart and Zingales disassemble this argument pointing out that the large companies often create negative externalities themselves like greenhouse gases and these consequences aren't easily reversed by their shareowners. 有些人说他们股东赚钱了再去投资环保事业也不错，Hart和Zingales反对，他俩认为他们公司干的坏事儿靠支持环保也逆转不过来。
Charities often don't have the economic left and political influence to overcome the negative impacts of companies. The two scholars also noted that ESG critics typically claimed companies couldn't easily discern their shareholder's values shareholders were too numerous to disperse, but in the age of the Internet and online polling simply false. 两位学者还指出，批评ESG的人通常声称，公司无法轻易辨别股东的价值观，因为股东太多而无法分散，但在互联网和在线投票时代，这种说法完全是错误的。
As a result, concerned owners could under some assumptions best impact ESG outcomes of concern to them by continuing to hold shares in a company and pressuring the management to change course. Countering this view are two recent studies providing evidence that divestment can be associated with a reduction in fossil-fuel financing and in carbon emissions. 两件事儿说明撤资跟减排还是有点关系的。
One finds that countries with a higher level of investors announced divestment commitments exhibit decreases in the level of fossil fuel investments. This reduction is more pronounced in countries with strong environmental policy regimes but lower for countries that heavily subsidize related industries. A second study analyzes the active trading behaviors of mutual funds focused on the highest carbon-emitting companies. They find that intentional sales of high carbon emitters are associated with significant future reductions in those companies' carbon emissions and intensity. Although these two studies suggest a possible role for investment, it's not possible in their study design, to separate out the effects of that divestment from the simultaneous constructive engagement and ESG integration analysis by other investors and prior research emphasizes that those are likely to be impactful as well. 尽管这两项研究表明了投资的可能作用，但在他们的研究设计中，不可能将这种撤资的影响与其他投资者同时进行的建设性参与和ESG整合分析分开。（虽然两个撤资的案例看到了碳排放的减少，但是不能确定是撤资影响了他们，还是别的原因，比如政策什么的改变了他们的行为。）
Source from：https://www.coursera.org/learn/esg-risks-opportunities/lecture/SQqcH/historical-origins
