Person:

Levine, David

Di erent discrete time triangular arrays representing a noisy signal of players' activities can lead to the same limiting di usion process yet lead to di erent limit equilibria. Whether the limit equilibria are equilibria of the limiting continuous time game depends on the limit properties of test statistics for whether a player has deviated. We provide an estimate of the tail probabilities along these arrays that allows us to determine the asymptotic behavior of the best test and thus of the best equilibrium.

Ratings of corporations' environmental activities and capabilities influence billions of dollars of "socially responsible" investments as well as some consumers, activists, and potential employees. In one of the first studies to assess these ratings, we examine how well the most widely used ratings those of Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD) provide transparency about past and likely future environmental performance. We find KLD "concern" ratings to be fairly good summaries of past environmental performance. In addition, firms with more KLD concerns have slightly, but statistically significantly, more pollution and regulatory compliance violations in later years. KLD environmental strengths, in contrast, do not accurately predict pollution levels or compliance violations. Moreover, we find evidence that KLD's ratings are not optimally using publicly available data. We discuss the implications of our findings for advocates and opponents of corporate social responsibility as well as for studies that relate social responsibility ratings to financial performance.