There's no question that ESG has been a very powerful marketing tool for the last 10 years. Money has flowed into funds that have advertised their ESG focus, as well as funds that don't compete for money, such as public pension funds and union funds. Those funds have political masters who are very concerned about ESG, so those funds tend to do a lot to advertise their ESG credentials.
What we've seen is that these funds don't reliably hold better ESG performers. If they do anything, they apply very crude screens that just block one or two industries, such as automotive or oil and gas. That's about the limit. They rely on these heavily flawed ESG ratings I was talking about in my remarks.
When we study what the companies actually do, we find no sign that those companies' ESG performance is improving, so it looks like this is mostly a marketing initiative on the part of the financial industry.