After Berkeley Haas professional faculty member Alex Budak created and launched his course “Becoming a Changemaker” in 2019, it quickly grew to be one of the most popular electives for both undergraduate and MBA students.
Erika Walker, senior assistant dean of instruction, introduced Budak and described the book as “very Haas.” It also connects closely with the school’s Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself.
“Students will share that the Becoming a Changemaker class was life-changing, even transformational, and that they were surprised that such a course as this was offered in business education,” she said. “It ultimately reframed the way students approached their own leadership journeys.”
Before Budak began teaching the class, he had to undergo his own changemaker journey. He recounted a “single, serendipitous” meeting with Jay Stowsky, then the senior assistant dean of instruction, about career advice.
“He said, ‘Alex what do you really want to do?'” Budak recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what I really want to do is teach,’ and then made some excuses for why I couldn’t possibly teach. But to my shock and delight he said, ‘All right, what do you want to teach?’ And in that moment, it became crystal clear. I said, ‘I want to teach ‘Becoming a Changemaker.'”
Stowsky told Budak to put together a syllabus. “I remember literally leaping out of my seat, so elated that someone else saw this potential in this class and this vision,” he said.
Budak then welcomed alumni Shannon Eliot, MBA 20, Angelica Song, BS 20, and Alicia Wilson, BS 23, (Ibrahim Baldé, BS 20, participated via video), for a panel discussion on their journeys to becoming changemakers.
In Part 2 of this two-part interview, Assoc. Professor Panos Patatoukas shares insights on the SEC’s new rules around the marketing of investment products marketed as socially responsible, as well as disclosure rules around companies’ ESG (environmental, social, and governance) activities. The interview also covers ESG valuation and investing, as well as divestment versus engagement—two different investor approaches to pressuring
Panos N. Patatoukas
The interview follows the Center for Financial Reporting and Management’s (CFRM)annual conference, which brought together high-level ESG investing thinkers with a wide range of perspectives on the direction of the industry. Among them were SEC Commissioner Hester M. Peirce, a Republican appointed by former President Trump; Janine Guillot, CEO of the Value Reporting Foundation and former CEO of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), which has developed the leading framework for ESG data; Andrew Behar, CEO of shareholder advocacy nonprofitAs You Sow, AJ Lindeman, who leads index and ESG quant research at Bloomberg; Karen Wong, who leads ESG & Sustainable Investing for State Street Global Advisors; and Wall Street Journal Senior Columnist James Mackintosh, an ESG investing skeptic.
Haas News: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is considering a host of new ESG disclosure rules. What will they do?
Panos Patatoukas: There are two new policy proposals (both released in May 2022) that would require additional disclosure regarding ESG strategies in fund prospectuses, annual reports, and adviser brochures. The SEC also proposed amendments to what’s called the fund names rule. Under the proposal, a fund that considers ESG factors alongside non-ESG factors may not be permitted to use ESG or similar terminology in its name, if doing so is materially deceptive or misleading. The idea behind these amendments is to prevent potential greenwashing or ESG lip-servicing, so that Main Street investors will not be deceived or misled.
At the conference, we heard from SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce argued that existing rules already allow the SEC to go after companies for any misrepresentations or omissions of “material” information? Do you agree?
I think it was important to have her perspective. Our conversation with Commissioner Peirce indicated that she is opposed to the rules not because she doesn’t think that greenwashing isn’t happening, but because she thinks we already have the regulatory tools to address it.
One good example of what she is talking about: The SEC recently fined Bank of New York Mellon Capital $1.5 million for misleading investors on false ESG quality reviews of some of the firm’s mutual funds. Of course, the $1.5 million fine is just a slap on the wrist, but it’s a signal that says the SEC can go after fund managers who make ESG claims but aren’t true to their promises. Consistent with the idea that the Bank of New York Mellon Capital case may provide a roadmap for future enforcement cases, the SEC has now taken on a much bigger player, looking into whether some of Goldman Sachs’ mutual funds don’t meet the ESG metrics proclaimed in their marketing materials.
If you scratch the surface of Commissioner Peirce’s argument, we get to the old question of: What’s the point of having rules and more rules if we don’t have sufficient enforcement? Should we allocate more resources creating new rules, or should we allocate those resources on enforcing existing rules—to the extent that the old rules are still relevant and effective?
My view is that the recent SEC proposals on funds and advisers that market themselves as having an ESG focus respond to the need for more transparency. More regulation in this regard might actually facilitate more enforcement. The bottom line is that unless we have both meaningful regulation and enforcement, we’re not going to achieve real progress.
But will these new disclosure rules actually make it easier for investors to, as you say, invest with their values?
In the absence of standardized and informative disclosures, in my opinion, it’s not entirely surprising that an ESG fund could exaggerate its actual consideration of ESG factors. If adopted, the proposed rules would require ESG-focused funds to provide more detailed information in a standardized tabular format. By providing information prominently, in the same location in each fund’s prospectus, the idea is that more disclosure would help improve investors’ understanding of ESG investment strategies and would assist them in comparing ESG-focused funds at a glance. The SEC also proposed amendments to existing rules to address materially deceptive or misleading ESG fund names. This new regulation basically says that fund managers who make ESG claims better be true to their promises. Because if not, that’s the definition of greenwashing.
I believe that a common, standardized disclosure framework tailored to ESG investing makes sense. So overall, I am in favor of providing more standardized disclosures about fund performance, investment strategies,and portfolio characteristics.
But we need to be careful. More disclosure will not automatically level the playing field for individual investors allowing them to make more informed decisions while investing in alignment with their values. If investors don’t have the financial acumen to process the disclosed information, then disclosure on its own may not be as impactful. Remember, while we are all investors, not everyone can access financial education. One of the things that preoccupies me is finding ways to make financial education and the power of financial data more accessible to everyone.
Critics of ESG investing say that it limits the universe of available stocks, which will negatively impact performance. You asked some of the panelists: “Can investors have their ESG cake and eat it too?” Can they do well by doing good?
I asked that question to the representatives from State Street and Bloomberg. State Street has been a leader in the ESG investment sector. They have all kinds of financial products, including scoring models, indices, and fund offerings using ESG data. For example, a key premise of State Street’s “Responsibility-Factor”—or “R-Factor”—scoring model is that it allows investors to identify companies that score higher on material ESG metrics. State Street’s R-Factor is also the ESG scoring model powering the Bloomberg/SASB ESG indices, which are used as ESG investing benchmarks.
My question was whether outperformance, relative to passive benchmarks, is a good measure of the effectiveness of State Street’s ESG scoring model. The response was ideally yes, but in practice, it doesn’t usually work that way and that a better measure of effectiveness might be “do no harm.” In other words, just make sure you don’t underperform the market benchmark, but without necessarily outperforming the benchmark.
This response in my opinion deviates from the way ESG scoring models have been marketed to everyday investors. ESG scoring models have often been promoted on the premise that the resulting ESG scores can help investors select stocks that will generate higher future returns.
In fact, the premise that you can “have the ESG cake and eat it too” has proven to be a highly effective narrative for the marketing of ESG funds and indices. Reflecting on these dynamics, I believe that there is a need for caution and more transparency on the part of ESG index providers and fund managers when marketing ESG scoring models and indices to everyday investors.
One of the most interesting discussions of the day centered on ESG strategies of engagement versus divestment. Let’s say we have good data to identify “brown” companies. Does removing them from a portfolio drive change?
The issue of engagement versus divestment is one of the most important, because I think that’s the one that can have immediate, real implications. The goal of ESG investing is not just to make money for ESG-motivated investors but also to change companies’ behavior through engagement and divestment. For example, divestment involves selling fossil fuel companies that have negative environmental impacts and buying “green” companies in other sectors. The idea behind divestment is that it raises the cost of capital for fossil fuel companies, thereby impeding their growth, while helping green companies grow. Based on this, several ESG-motivated investors have called for complete divestment from the fossil fuel sector.
For example, the University of California made the decision to remove all companies that own fossil fuel reserves from the UC Retirement Savings Program (RSP) fund. As of today (June 30, 2022), they sold existing holdings from RSP core funds and will no longer invest in fossil fuel companies.
The UC retirement fund is a relatively small fraction of the total market, and when UC RSP sold stocks of fossil fuel companies, somebody else bought that stock. Nevertheless, it does raise the question: Will divesting from fossil fuel companies accelerate the path to decarbonization of the economy? Where will the technology that will change our lives come from? Will it come from an entirely different sector, or could it also come from leading companies in this sector?
Outright divesting should be contrasted to an alternative approach, let’s call it selective divesting. Consider the fossil fuel sector as a whole. Within the sector, there are leading companies that are innovating, investing in new technologies, and there are lagging companies that are falling behind and continuing their dirty practices. Divesting from all of them is one possibility. An alternative would be to divest only from the laggards and reallocate this capital to the leaders. This approach of selective divesting and tilting may be desirable for an ESG-motivated investor because (a) it would reward companies that invest in transformative technologies and (b) it would penalize companies that do not adopt. This approach effectively blends divestment with engagement. The bottom line: Is indiscriminate divestment from fossil fuel the best way to accelerate progress or is the alternative approach of selective divesting and rewarding change a more effective approach to realizing our sustainability goals?
Wall Street Journal columnist James Mackintosh argued an investor’s role is to make a return within an acceptable level of risk, not push for change. He said it’s more effective to push change at companies through consumer actions, through buying power, or through government. What do you think?
Consumers and investors can be a force for change. ESG-motivated investors are asking for more transparency and verifiable data that they can use to make more informed investment decisions. Consumers are also asking for more transparency, and more reliable, verifiable and standardized data to inform their consumption choices. I believe that change could come from anywhere.
With respect to lawmakers, I agree that they have the power to drive change. For example, as many economists have been arguing for years, introducing a carbon tax in the corporate tax code would effectively change the incentives and behavior of companies by internalizing the negative externalities of carbon emissions. But still, measurement issues may hamper the effectiveness. Suppose we introduce a carbon tax, we still need to measure carbon emissions. Should the measure of carbon emissions include only direct emissions and emissions resulting from the company’s energy use—known as Scope 1 and 2 emissions? Or, should the measure also include Scope 3 emissions, those resulting from activities that the organization indirectly impacts in its value chain? While Scope 3 emissions often account for the biggest part of a company’s emissions, they are also the hardest to measure.
What are you most optimistic about right now in terms of ESG investing?
I think over time, we will have more transparency and more tools that will allow everyday investors to invest with their values and to be more aware of what they’re investing in. And we’re going to have more and better data that will allow us to overcome the measurement challenges, monitor corporate impact, align management incentives with long-term sustainability goals, and facilitate the allocation of capital in ideas and technologies that will drive change for good.
I also think we’ll have the technology required for individual investors to be more active participants in corporate decision-making. For example, I think it’s a matter of time before pass-through voting becomes available to every individual investor. A bit of context: Many of us individual investors participate in the stock market through index funds offered by large asset managers. Stock indexing has enabled us to get access to diversified portfolios at a low cost. The Big 3 asset managers—Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street—dominate the field, with a collective >80% share of index fund assets. The Big 3 alone manage $20 trillion in assets.
One key implication of the growth in stock indexing among the largest asset managers is the voting power they have amassed over time, since they typically vote on behalf of individual investors. Giving every individual investor the option to participate in the proxy voting process can help them amplify their impact collectively on the issues that matter to them the most. This is an exciting prospect compared to today’s reality where a small set of individuals representing the top asset managers gets to decide on our behalf.
It’s about time to ensure that the voices of everyday investors are being heard.
Jude Watson, MBA 23, worked as a chef before founding Cooks for Black Lives Matter.
Haas Voices is a series that highlights the lived experiences of members of the Berkeley Haas community.
Jude Watson, MBA 23, never intended to become a social entrepreneur. But that was before Watson successfully founded Seattle-based Cooks for Black Lives Matter. Watson, who for years worked as a chef, raised $100,000 by selling CSA (community-supported agriculture) food boxes of gourmet treats donated by cooks, restaurants, and farmers to support Black-led community organizers. We interviewed Watson about the power of community organizing, and their experiences as MBA Association student body president and as a transgender student at Haas. (Jude uses the pronouns they/them/theirs)
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Seattle on Capitol Hill, which is the gayborhood of Seattle. My mom’s a hair stylist and my dad does a lot of climate justice work. I had a very socially motivated family and that shaped a lot of how I grew up. I felt very connected to the community in a lot of ways because both my parents are firmly rooted in Seattle and very present in our community.
Did you become politically active at a young age?
Yes, at age 16. When I realized I was queer, and especially when I realized I was gender expansive, I got very involved with local queer youth organizing. There was this amazing group of queer young people who were trying to start a community center for ourselves. A lot of LGBTQ spaces tend to be bars, so there aren’t many inclusive places for young queer people. We founded the first youth-led LGBTQ community center in Seattle with large grants from the City of Seattle and the Point Foundation. That period of my life was a mind-blowing crash course in community organizing. I also met and was mentored by trans adults for the first time, which was very meaningful and helped me imagine a future for myself.
Sounds like that was a very open and formative environment.
Definitely. I learned so much about social justice issues, especially around race, class, and disability. We were a diverse crew and it was a very energizing organizing community to be a part of. While doing that organizing, I graduated from high school when I was 16, and did an early entrance program at the University of Washington, where I made my own major in the History of Social Movements by pulling together classes in history, ethnic studies, women and gender studies. It was a great way to learn how social changes happens over time in different social contexts, and informed my work with Queer Youth Space.
As a teen, Watson helped found the first youth-led LGBTQ community center in Seattle.
What did you see yourself doing after graduation?
I saw myself doing social work and community organizing with young people, which I pursued for a couple years after I graduated. But I also craved more creative work, so at age 22 I took a very abrupt left turn to pursue a career as a chef. I left my job working with young people and got a job as a restaurant prep cook, and then worked my way up to a chef-level position for the next seven years. I even spent a summer learning traditional butchery in Italy from a third-generation pig farmer, which was mind blowing.
Watson learned to make sausage in Italy from a third-generation pig farmer.
What made you leave cooking?
Although I loved my career in kitchens in many ways, it was also an incredibly intense experience that I have a lot of ambivalence about. There are parts of my job that were life affirming and beautiful, and there were parts about it that were horrifying: toxic people, sexual harassment, gnarly injuries, constant violations of labor laws. At some point I was deeply burned out and knew, “It is not healthy for me to keep doing this.” But I still deeply love cooking. I’ve done some elaborate dinner parties for fellow Haasies.
So how did you end up in business school?
Seattle was the first city that got COVID in the U.S., so we shut down our restaurants before everyone else did. At that point, I turned back into community organizing and founded the social enterprise Cooks for Black Lives Matter, which has raised over $100,000 for local Black-led community organizing. Although at the time I just felt like I was doing something to be useful during such a dark time, I eventually realized, “Oh, I’m an entrepreneur now. I’m genuinely good at this,” and I wanted to build up those skills more. I contemplated a master’s in social work or public policy, but I thought it would be a bigger stretch for me to learn more about business.
Are you happy with that choice?
I’m so glad to be at Haas. It’s unbelievable the amount of opportunities that exist in business school. You have access to so much, which is often unbelievable to me coming from the service industry where you’re always given the bare minimum. One of my best experiences at Haas was in Lean LaunchPad last semester, where I was on the team with MBA student Carlson Giddings, helping her start a sweet potato flour company. I did all the recipe development for our team, and learned so much about the entrepreneurship side of the food CPG industry from entrepreneurship experts with decades of experience. During that class, I got to make a short video about our project and get editing help from Ralph Guggenheim, one of the co-producers of Toy Story and a mentor in the class. That’s one of those opportunities that, if I wasn’t at Haas, I would never in a million years have had access to.
Watson and classmate Alex Angarita making waffles using sweet potato flour developed by Carlson Giddings, MBA 23.
You’re an active student leader at Haas. What’s that been like?
Although I would love to find out that I’m wrong about this, I believe I’m the first ever out transgender person to be the student president of an MBA program. It’s been a huge priority for me to have more conversations about trans identity at Haas. Via Abolencia, MBA/MPH 23, is one of my best friends, a fellow non-binary student here, and a co-president of Q@Haas. Together, we ran an event called Trans Futures, featuring a panel of trans advocates from public health, consulting, and community organizing, which was such a moving experience. The vast majority of the time, I’m the only trans person in the room at school and at work, which is a fairly exhausting experience. To create a trans-led space at Haas was good for my heart. It’s powerful for my classmates, most of whom have never seen eight trans people together before in their lives, to get to listen to these incredible activists reflect together on their work and their lives. That is by far the event I’m most proud of running at Haas.
Any suggestions for how our community members can be better allies to the trans community?
Overall, I would say read trans authors and watch media made by trans people, because I think what many people are lacking is empathy for our life experience. Follow some trans people on social media, and in general gain a more casual familiarity with the language we use and the struggles and successes a lot of us share. We’re not a huge percentage of the population, (although the number of people that identify as gender expansive is growing as more people feel comfortable coming out), so cis people need to put in more effort themselves to build their familiarity and comfort with trans people.
Haas Voices is a first-person series that highlights the lived experiences of members of the Berkeley Haas community. In honor of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we spoke with Angelo Ignacio, EMBA 22, an email marketing manager at 23andMe, who’s committed to mission-driven work. He shares his story below.
Angelo Ignacio, EMBA 22
Social impact work and storytelling have been at the heart of everything that I do. As a marketing major at Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit private college in Los Angeles, I envisioned working at a big advertising agency after college. But the 2008 recession forced me to shift gears and be open to other possibilities. It was a sobering moment for me because I learned that life doesn’t always go the way you plan, but if you approach life with a half-glass full mentality—something that I inherited from my parents—you can overcome anything. The recession, in my view, was a shortcut to finding my purpose and pursuing a mission-driven career.
After college I joined Invisible Children, a nonprofit humanitarian organization whose mission is to stop the use of child soldiers and reunite children with their families. That work opened my eyes to the impact of storytelling and marketing to get people to rally for a good cause.
One of the projects that I worked on was building a marketing campaign to raise funds that were then used to charter helicopters. The helicopters would fly over Kiliwa in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nzako in Central African Republic, drop compostable flyers with directions to safe zones, and use loudspeakers to play recorded messages from parents whose children had been abducted. To see this project come to life and help children flee their captors was incredible. Seeing actual cell phone footage of reunited families from our partners on the ground was one of the proudest moments of my life. I went on to work at other nonprofits including World Vision, and Seattle Children’s Hospital.
While I found working in the nonprofit sector incredibly rewarding, I realized that the nonprofit world could benefit from having more leaders with business backgrounds—leaders who push for operational efficiency and consumer-driven segment marketing campaigns. These are big stretches for even large companies like World Vision, but they are necessary steps for growth and sustainability. I felt like if I was going to continue on in this career field, I needed to bring a business skillset to the nonprofit world.
While I found working in the nonprofit sector incredibly rewarding, I realized that the nonprofit world could benefit from having more leaders with business backgrounds.
Just like in 2008, I found myself grappling with a world filled with uncertainty in 2020. Despite the challenges brought on by the global pandemic, I decided to enroll at Haas because I believed that there was no better time to go to business school. The world was changing rapidly and I figured if I waited any longer, I wouldn’t be able to learn in an environment where things were happening in real time.
Since coming to Haas, I’ve taken classes that have shaped me into the business leader that I want to become. One class that has left the biggest impact on me is Executive Leadership taught by Harris Sondack. At the heart of this class is figuring out who you want to be and the kind of leader you want to be. Lecturer Sondak asks ethical and philosophical questions that truly make your brain hurt, but in a good way.
Since coming to Haas, I’ve taken classes that have shaped me into the business leader that I want to become.
Another invaluable class that has left a profound impact is Leadership Communications taught by Lecturer Mark Rittenberg. This course focuses on how to effectively tell your personal story, how to show up and be present for others, and how to lead teams and organizations. The biggest takeaway from that course was learning and proudly accepting that I’m also a storyteller. I don’t have to choose between being a business leader and a storyteller, I can be both at the same time.
I now have a new outlook on my career path. I’ve realized that I don’t need to remain in the nonprofit world to positively create change, but I do know that whatever I decide to do, it has to connect back to impact and mission-driven work.
Helen Hatch, EWMBA 22, and Adjunct Professor Paul Jansen believe that every nonprofit organization could benefit from hiring a chief governance officer. So what’s holding them back?
We asked Hatch about why a chief governance officer is essential and how she’s helping with a plan to train the first class of chief governance officers through a pilot program sponsoredby the Center for Social Sector Leadership at Haas.
Berkeley Haas News: How did you get interested in the topic of improving nonprofit governance?
Helen Hatch: Good governance is integral to thesuccess or failure of nonprofit organizations. My interest in investigating nonprofit governance wastwofold. First, I work in development at a large nonprofit arts organization and wanted to understand the nuances of governance while exploring a solution to thechallenges that frequently face nonprofit boards, and second, I was excited by theopportunity to impact the entire nonprofit sector by providing an actionable way for boards toaddress common governance obstacles before they become major issues.
How did you and Paul Jansen decide to work together on this?
Nora Silver, adjunct professor and founder and faculty director for the Center for Social SectorLeadership, introduced me to Paul in August 2020 when he was developing a hypothesiscalled “Board Chair as Chief Governance Officer” and seeking a research partner. I sawa tremendous opportunity to learn from Paul, who has deep expertise in the nonprofit sectorand nonprofit boards, and was excited to immerse myself in a subject that was so relevant tomy professional field. Paul and I met virtually in September 2020 and have been workingtogether ever since.
Good governance is integral to thesuccess or failure of nonprofit organizations.
Adjunct Professor Paul Jansen, Business & Social Impact
What’s at stake when a nonprofit has poor governance, and can you provide a fewexamples of how it hurts an organization?
High-profile governance failures make headlines and come with real costs to nonprofits. For example, the Wounded Warrior Project was hit by allegations of “waste and unbridled spending” by leadership in 2016. The CEO and COO were fired, and total revenues fell from a peak in 2015 of $483M to $280M in 2017 and still have not returned to pre-crisis levels. In higher education, How USC Became the Most Scandal-Plagued Campus in Americadetails how the University of Southern California suffered from a “contagion of shaky oversight and money grabbing” with the cost of lawsuits expected to exceed $1 billion. Damage to reputation and the finances of nonprofits likewise transpired from oversight scandals at the United Way USA, Boy Scouts of America, and numerous private high schools and colleges around the country.
Governance failures, however, are not always so public or so headline grabbing. Still, the costs in terms of weaker strategies, underperformance against mission, donor hesitancy, ineffective advocacy, discouraged employees, and time spent managing potentially damaging revelations are just as real and go a long way to explain why some nonprofits successfully grow and increase their impact while others quietly fail.
Do any nonprofits have a CGO? Why should nonprofits appoint one?
No such position currently exists, but the experienced directors we spoke with agreed that an “independent, objective, organization-first mindset and willingness to ask hard, sometimes uncomfortable questions” constituted the essential skill set for this role.
And while the idea of “Board Chair as CGO” was the initial hypothesis of our research, we quickly realized that it would be more impactful for the board chair to have a trusted, governance-focused thought partner who was empowered to credibly raise and address issues when they happen. The CGO is proposed as a board leadership role that seeks to improve board effectiveness by sharpening compliance oversight and helping the board dedicate time to high-value organization leadership activities and mission fulfillment.
What’s next for the research?
We are now looking to test and refine the CGO concept through a pilot program sponsoredby the Center for Social Sector Leadership. We plan to train a class of CGOs, measure theimpact on board performance over time, and use the learnings to refine the CGO concept.We invite interested organizations to contact us at helen_hatch@berkeley.eduandpauljansen@berkeley.edu.
Spring 2022|By Mary O’Connell| PHOTO: MUSLIANSHAH MASRIE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Lessons on closing the gender pay gap
About half the world’s population is self-employed, and self-employed women earn about half as much as men, according to the World Bank. Social economists long believed that increasing women’s access to capital would shrink the earnings gap.
But in developing countries, new cash influxes often went to shore up the businesses of men—whereas the women’s businesses often stayed flat.
“Women everywhere face unique constraints, and a one-size-fits-all solution sometimes can lead to positive benefits for men but not for women,” says Assistant Professor Solène Delecourt.
“The women tell us they want to be closer to home; they’re concerned about safety getting home after dark and worry whether their husbands will suspect them of having affairs if they’re late.”
In three new studies, Delecourt and colleagues looked at why women-owned businesses in Uganda, Kenya, and India underperform men’s.
Delecourt teamed with Anne Fitzpatrick of UMass to study small pharmacy owners in Uganda. While none of the men had children at work, about a third of the women were balancing childcare while running their businesses. They earned less than half as much as women without children on-site, the researchers found.
In another study, Delecourt, Fitzpatrick, and others traced 12% of the earnings gap among small shop owners in Western Kenya to one source: location. The stores run by women were typically farther from busy town centers; some were home-based.
The reasons are firmly rooted in gender roles. “The women tell us they want to be closer to home; they’re concerned about safety getting home after dark and worry whether their husbands will suspect them of having affairs if they’re late,” Delecourt says.
In a third study in the market in Jaipur, India, Delecourt and Odyssia Ng of the World Bank set up six shops in prime spots with identical inventories. They recruited 282 vendors—half men, half women—to run them for a day. They found that male shoppers were just as likely to buy from a female vendor as women were to buy from a male vendor, and there was no difference in earnings.
“What we saw dispels much of the bias about women in business,” says Delecourt. “If women are given the same business—in this case a functioning, well-stocked, well-located store—then their stores perform as well as men’s.”
Everyone pays a price for the constraints on women’s earning power, says Delecourt. Less money means fewer opportunities for children and has an outsized impact on the economies of their countries.
Women the world over face a gender pay gap—but not always for the same reasons. Solutions, then, need to be tied to specific locales. “My hope is that by identifying women-specific constraints, we’ll be able to test tailored solutions to address them,” Delecourt says.
Kiron Chandy was a teenager growing up in Silicon Valley when she learned how “paying forward” career support can translate into a wider sphere of influence. At 16, while visiting family in India, she met Nobel Peace Prize nominee Beena Sebastian, an advocate for vulnerable women and children.
“Beena supported me to develop a volunteer network alongside the women’s shelter she runs,” Chandy says. “Working with her was transformational. She believed in me, and from her, I learned to believe in other people.”
At Haas, Chandy wrote about her experience with Sebastian for Lecturer Daniel Mulhern’s Everyday Leadership class. Mulhern encouraged her to start a venture. Consult Your Community (CYC), a pro bono consultancy, launched in 2013. The organization mobilizes teams of college students to help small business owners implement meaningful changes.
Its stats are inspiring: Since 2015, some 2,500 student volunteers from 28 universities have contributed more than 637,000 consulting hours, creating $12 million in economic value for neighborhoods nationwide. And rather than dampening CYC’s efforts, COVID had an invigorating effect: 50 volunteers from 18 universities helped many small business entrepreneurs stay open longer than they might have without the support—five months on average, according to 14 entrepreneurs, Chandy says.
For Chandy, paying forward her support means encouraging CYC volunteers to take ownership of the organization’s mission—and to build worthwhile careers.
“Thoreau wrote that most people live lives of ‘quiet desperation,’” she says. “I want to support both our volunteers and small business owners to live lives of quiet inspiration.”
Sneha Solanki, David Siap, and Adriana Penuela-Useche, all EWMBA 22, helped Berkeley Haas host a Feb. 23 Climate Tech Cocktails Happy Hour.
A crowd of more than 600 people—from engineers and investors to Bay Area startup founders and students passionate about the environment—bundled up in the Berkeley Haas courtyard on a recent chilly evening to network about climate tech.
“We hope the night helped inspire the cross-pollination of ideas beyond the MBA community,” said Adriana Penuela-Useche, EWMBA 22, who helped organize the Feb. 23 Climate Tech Cocktails Happy Hour with classmates Sneha Solanki and David Siap, also EWMBA 22. “Climate tech is a necessity for humanity and seeing so many people completely engaged and alive talking about climate encourages all of us to roll up our sleeves and act fast.”
Climate Tech Cocktails Happy Hours, founded by climate tech investor Matt Myers, have brought more than 1,200 people from the climate tech innovation community together across the country since its launch in summer 2021. “My hope is that the Climate Tech Cocktails platform can help inspire MBA students to create or work for climate tech startups to save humanity from itself,” said Myers, who produces a podcast of the same name.
A crowd of more than 600 people attended the Climate Tech Cocktails event in the Haas courtyard Feb. 23.
The night came together at Haas after Penuela-Useche, Solanki, and Siap reached out to Myers, who was looking for a venue to host his next event.
“Sneha, David, and I had been going to these in the Bay Area,” said Penuela-Useche, who recently left her job to focus on a career in venture capital funding for climate tech. “When Matt’s email went out asking for a venue, we jumped on board.”
Major climate tech investors, including Strawberry Creek Ventures, Fifty Years Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and Sapphire Ventures, co-sponsored the event.
Matt Caspari, MBA 06, is a managing partner at Strawberry Creek Ventures, a UC Berkeley alumni venture fund that invests in companies led by UC Berkeley alumni. “It was the largest in-person gathering I’ve been to in a couple of years and it was energizing to see so many people passionate about climate and sustainability,” he said.
“It was energizing to see so many people passionate about climate and sustainability,” said Matt Caspari, MBA 06 and managing partner with Strawberry Creek Ventures.
Holding the event at Berkeley Haas and having so many students, along with 20 startups, attend made the event special, said Caspari, who started climate-focused venture-backed company Aurora Biofuels while he was at Haas.
“Being back at Haas and seeing how much interest has grown in this sector made it significant for me,” he said. In 2006, venture creation was focused heavily around alternative fuels and solar, he said. “Today, every industry is being transformed—and that creates a much broader opportunity for startup creation for entrepreneurs interested in sustainability/climate.”
Penuela-Useche, Siap and Solanki enlisted the help of 15 MBA volunteers to help welcome and register attendees. Avni Kansara, director of student experience with the Berkeley Haas EWMBA program, helped with event logistics and Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program, rounded up climate tech startups to attend.
Solanki, who like Penuela-Useche studied chemical engineering as an undergrad and is now interested in early-seed stage venture investing, couldn’t get a visa in time to attend the event, but said she was present “in spirit.” “I think it was amazing to have people standing in the middle of campus speaking from the heart about climate change,” she said.
Siap, a former intern in business and strategy at X, the moonshot factory, where he consulted on climate-related projects including direct air capture, e-fuels, and carbon offsets, said the event came together well. “There was a ton of organic interest from startups, VCs, and, most importantly, students,” he said. “I would love to see Haas use its position in the ecosystem and make this its own annual event.”
It’s no secret that Robert Strand, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business at Berkeley Haas, believes the Nordics hold the key to the future of American capitalism. Strand, who came to Haas in 2014 after earning a PhD and becoming a sustainability professor at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, is finishing a book called “Sustainable Vikings: What the Nordics Can Teach Us about Reimagining American Capitalism.” He has been using drafts of the book to teach in his undergraduate and MBA course, Sustainable Capitalism in the Nordics. Strand is also now the executive director of the new UC Berkeley Nordic Center.
Robert Strand
We spoke with Strand about the future of capitalism and his award-winning case Patagonia’s path to carbon neutrality by 2025, along with his Nordic Center role.
The Financial Times recently honored the Berkeley Haas Patagonia case in its special report on Responsible Business Education. (The case was co-written in 2018 with CRB’s former associate director, Seren Pendleton-Knoll, UC Berkeley Professor Daniel Kammen, and Patagonia employees, including Vincent Stanley.) What was your goal with the case?
The goal was to help frame this wicked problem of climate change and provide inspiration for other companies to take action. There’s real strength in acknowledging that a problem exists, that business is part of the problem, and that even a sustainability-leading company like Patagonia does not know exactly what to do. Patagonia is leveraging every resource at its disposal, including the Center for Responsible Business, to help frame the issues at hand. Within that case, we wanted to highlight tensions involved when you talk about running a for-profit business and you also desire to address a great issue like climate change.
There’s real strength in acknowledging that a problem exists, that business is part of the problem, and that even a sustainability-leading company like Patagonia does not know exactly what to do.
What did Patagonia do differently to address these challenges?
Patagonia is engaging in open innovation, drawing from a concept from our Berkeley Haas colleague Henry Chesbrough, to tackle its challenges. Through the authoring of a case and its use in the Patagonia Case Competition that we run through the Center for Responsible Business, Patagonia is opening its challenges up to the world for help. The likelihood that the best ideas and best solutions to tackle climate change exist within the walls of Patagonia are next to none. We can help Patagonia find solutions to its problems and facilitate cooperation with a variety of new stakeholders that Patagonia may have otherwise never encountered.
What can companies and our students learn from Patagonia?
Wicked problems like climate change demand cooperation. They demand us coming together and addressing a problem that affects us all. We must go beyond ourselves to address this. American business students need to get comfortable with cooperation and working beyond the walls of their companies to address our greatest sustainability challenges. This often includes engaging with industry peers. I deliberately use the expression industry peers as opposed to competitors because language matters and a peer is someone with whom you collaborate.
American business students need to get comfortable with cooperation and working beyond the walls of their companies to address our greatest sustainability challenges.
Your views on capitalism were deeply influenced by the time you spent living in Norway. How?
When I came from the Copenhagen Business School to Haas in 2014, my Trojan Horse agenda was the Nordics. My American mind was revolutionized by my experiences living and working in the Nordic countries for the better part of a decade. As a PhD-student-turned-professor in Denmark, I saw first-hand the policies and practices that were working really well there to better ensure the well-being of every member of society. These were policies and practices that I was told in the United States couldn’t work—including access to childcare, paid parental leaves, universal access to health care and education—because they were called socialism and had to be a drag on efficiency. However, I saw that the Nordic countries are market-based economies and exemplars of capitalism, but just a different variety of capitalism than what we know in the U.S. I saw how Nordic societies were more efficiently and equitably handling their challenges. I began to realize maybe the problem lies with us Americans. That set me on the path of questioning the status quo of American capitalism, and what better place to do such a thing than Berkeley Haas.
Let’s shift gears and discuss what you are working on now.
I’m finishing my book “Sustainable Vikings,” which is about what the Nordics can teach us about reimagining American capitalism. I use drafts of it in all the classes that I teach at Berkeley Haas and have just loved the discussions with our bright and wonderful Haas students over these past years. They are now a part of this book. I want to be part of normalizing the approach I saw in the Nordic societies where business leaders saw themselves as stewards of the company and society. I fear too many companies and too many prominent business figures in the United States have adopted an extractive approach. We need to fight this extractive approach head on because it is leading us all to a very bad place. But, I should stress there is nothing that says somebody needs to be from a place like Denmark to be a steward. I am talking about the need for a mindset shift where we discard the old assumptions that do not serve us well.
We need more American business leaders like Rose Marcario, former CEO of Patagonia, and Chip Bergh, CEO of Levi’s, and a partner of the Center for Responsible Business, who is leveraging his platform to elevate the risks to our democratic institutions and the need to strengthen our American democracy.
UC Berkeley recently launched the new Nordic Center and named you director. What has the center been up to?
The Nordic Center is institutionally tied to the Center for Responsible Business, the Scandinavian Department, and the Institute for European Studies, so we straddle the campus to bring the best of Berkeley to the Nordic agenda. Our first big event was the Nordic Sustainable Food Summit this fall, drawing upon our competency in sustainable food with Will Rosenzweig and courses like Edible Education, and the Plant Futures Lab. We showcased our Nordic connections, including Björn Öste,founder of Oatly, an oat milk company out of Sweden. We’ll make it an annual event and next year we will beef up ladder faculty participation, including our great researchers like Professor Paul Gertler, who’s interested in things like sugar taxes that Norway has implemented to compare with efforts here in the U.S. Our students are connecting with these Nordic-based firms and startups and next year we hope to be in- person at Haas, sharing some great Nordic food!
A primary driver behind the Nordic Center is Barbro Osher, a good friend to UC Berkeley and a good friend of mine. Without her, none of this would have been possible. Barbro gave me the nickname “Mr. Nordic,” and what a pleasure it has been to get the Nordic Center established in partnership with her and our friends and colleagues across UC Berkeley.
“Classified” is an occasional series spotlighting some of the powerful lessons being taught in classrooms around Haas.
Students working on their projects for Electronic Arts, Dell, Autodesk, and other companies during a session of the Tech for Good class. Photo: Dave Rochlin.
Julie Kang, MBA 22, used to be concerned about the direction of the tech industry and its negative implications for society.
Then an exciting summer project led her to sign up for a new Berkeley Haas course called Designing Tech for Good, which made Kang see the industry through a different lens. The class called on student teams to work on projects that promoted social good at big tech companies, including Electronic Arts, Dell, Autodesk, and UI Path.
Dave Rochlin teaches the Designing Tech for Good course with Adam Rosenzweig, EMBA 19.
“Tech firms want to demonstrate that their platforms can do good,” said continuing lecturer Dave Rochlin, who co-created and taught the elective for the first time last semester with instructor Adam Rosenzweig, EMBA 19. “We wanted to look at what companies can do to minimize harm but also focus on how they can create positive change. Tech for good initiatives can help firms promote a values-based culture and better connect the firms’ core business with the sustainable development goals and other ESG metrics.”
Creating business value and social value
Rosenzweig, senior manager of product impact at online identity management company Okta, also leads Okta’s “tech for good” strategy, which drove his interest in launching the course. Rosenzweig brings real-world experiences to the course, which enrolls 30 Berkeley Haas students and six students from the Goldman School of Public Policy.
“We want students to learn how to design programs that are good for the world within whatever companies they go to work for,” he said. “If we don’t go out of our way to solve social problems, they won’t solve themselves. It’s critical for leaders to know how to create business value and social value at the same time.”
The students’ projects varied in scope. For Dell, teams worked with the CTO’s external research group on how technology such as virtual reality headsets might be used to increase civic engagement. For UiPath and Autodesk, students focused on how their platforms could best help NGOs to become more effective and identify which NGOs might benefit most.
“It’s critical for leaders to know how to create business value and social value at the same time.” – Adam Rosenzweig.
Joy of connection
The Electronic Arts project aligned perfectly with the course theme. While online games provide joy and community for many, they’re also fertile ground for bad behavior, Rochlin said.
For the project, two student teams split up to work on ideas for both the shooter game franchises (such as Apex) and sports games (such as FIFA) with a goal of supporting the Electronic Arts Positive Play Initiative. “I was thrilled that EA wanted the teams to focus on insights and initiatives relating to the joy of connection rather than just community policing,” Rochlin said.
Kang, who worked on the shooter games project, said when she tried gaming at a younger age, she felt overwhelmed. “I tried to learn but found it difficult to get good fast,” she said. “As a kid, I had negative experiences online with people saying mean things.”
The EA project included three phases: discovery, where team members read up on gaming in forums on online publications before interviewing gamers from different backgrounds. They then developed and presented EA with a framework which focused on both the root causes of bad experiences. Phase three involved coming up with solutions to pitch to the company.
Students made recommendations to tech companies through their Tech For Good projects.
The students recommended several ideas they felt would have impact and were achievable, said Sania Salman, MBA 22. Those ideas included bringing players from online together offline to create micro-communities of people from different schools or affinity groups who engage in tournaments. “This takes the vastness of the digital world community and makes it more accessible,” Salman said.
A second idea involved creating incentives and awards for advanced players to mentor newer players. Kang said she particularly liked the mentoring idea. “That would have been super helpful for me to get better at gaming and solving the isolation that happens with new gamers,” she said.
A second idea involved creating incentives and awards for advanced players to mentor newer players.
“Exceptional” teams
Chris Norris, director of Positive Play at EA, noted that for Electronic Arts and the Positive Play team, “It’s incredibly important that we ensure our experiences are minimally disruptive, while also focusing efforts on amplifying the meaningful connections and moments of joy that games provide.”
Working with the two Haas project teams was exceptional, he added. “The students brought an intellectual rigor and sharp perspective, focused entirely on improving the player experience,” he said.
Rochlin, who recently wrote a Berkeley Haas case on tech for good and human-centered product design, said he’s looking forward to teaching the course again. “This course was a dream for Adam and I,” he said. “Many Haas students have an interest in pursuing careers in tech firms and a desire to find meaningful career work that reflects their values. It doesn’t need to be ‘either/or.'”
Constance Akamo is pictured at her cosmetics shop in Gulu, Uganda. (Photo by Sally Hayden / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)
About half of the world’s population is self-employed, and self-employed women earn only about half as much as men, according to the World Bank. Social scientists believed for years that increasing women’s access to capital would shrink the earnings gap.
But in developing countries, they found that new influxes of cash often went to shore up the businesses of men—whereas the women’s businesses more often stayed flat.
“There is no country in the world without a gender gap in earnings,” said Solène Delecourt, a Berkeley Haas assistant professor of management who studies inequality in business performance. “Women everywhere face unique constraints, and a one-size-fits-all solution sometimes can lead to positive benefits for men, but not for women.”
In three new studies, Delecourt and colleagues looked at why women-owned businesses in Uganda, Kenya, and India underperform businesses operated by men in those countries. Their findings not only include some surprises, but hold clues for specific strategies to address earnings inequality everywhere.
The “baby-profit gap” in Uganda
Delecourt teamed with Anne Fitzpatrick of the University of Massachusetts for a study on the “baby-profit gap,”published in Management Science.
Looking at data Fitzpatrick collected for an earlier study of small pharmacies in Uganda, the researchers noticed that while none of the men had children at work, about a third of the women were balancing childcare while running their businesses.
The childcare duties were taking a toll, literally: In a side-by-side analysis, the researchers found that the women who were running their businesses while taking care of their children earned less than half as much as the women without children in their stores.
“What we were seeing was unmistakable: We started to think of it as a baby-profit gap,” Delecourt said.
The study also shows how questions change—and overlooked insights emerge—when researchers with diverse backgrounds are in the field. “No one had looked at the data that way before,” Delecourt said. “We were both women expecting our second children, so perhaps that’s why we noticed the gap.”
Kenya: Location, location, location
Now Delecourt and Fitzpatrick, along with Laura Barasa of the University of Nairobi, and Layna Lowe and Anya Marchenko from UC Berkeley’s Center for Effective Global Action, are crunching data for another study on women’s business performance in Kenya.
The researchers compared the differences in earnings between men and women owners of about 2,000 small stores in Western Kenya, where women on average earn 75% less than men. While stressing that their findings aren’t causal, the researchers were able to trace 12% of the wage gap to one source: location. The stores run by women were almost always sited in less-desirable spots, typically farther from busy town centers. Some women were running home-based businesses, which averaged about 30% fewer customers.
The suspected reasons are firmly rooted in gender roles.
“The women tell us they want to be closer to home; they’re concerned about safety getting home after dark and worry whether their husbands will suspect them of having affairs if they’re late,” Delecourt said. The women also said working at home makes it easier to balance competing demands of home and work-life, such as childcare or chores.
“Gendered constraints at the intersection of family and the marketplace contribute to gender inequality in business performance,” the researchers concluded.
A novel experiment in Jaipur, India
The results of a third study didn’t just surprise Delecourt—they shocked her.
Focusing on the market in Jaipur, India, Delecourt and Odyssia Ng of the World Bank wanted to find out whether buyer behavior was contributing to the wage gap. Were buyers more reluctant to purchase from women? They expected the answer to be yes.
They constructed a field experiment that not only shows women’s earning power, but gives new meaning to the words “intrepid researchers.” They battled predawn inventory runs, rogue goats, and hungry rats who munched on the produce purchased for the experiment. Ng even came down with dengue fever.
In the end, they had six stores in prime locations, with identical inventories. They hired 282 sellers from the market—half of them women, half men—to come and run the businesses for a day.
They found that given the choice of equally attractive options, buyers did not select shops based on the proprietors’ gender. Male buyers were just as likely to buy from a female shop owner as women were to buy from a male shop owner.
“What we saw dispels so much of the bias about women in business,” said Delecourt. “If women are given the same business—in this case a functioning, well-stocked, well-located store—then their stores perform as well as men’s.”
Learn more about the study in this podcast interview with Delecourt:
Targeted solutions
Everyone pays a price for the constraints on women’s earning power, Delecourt believes. Less money for families means fewer opportunities for children. And suppressing women’s earning potential has an outsized impact on the aggregate economies of their countries.
Delecourt’s research suggests that targeted solutions to address known barriers could pave the way for further change. In Uganda, providing day-care support could open up earnings for women. In Kenya, better store locations may be a game changer.
Adjusted for cultural and social differences, these findings also underscore that while women globally face similar constraints, the solutions can’t be cookie-cutter.
“While my colleagues and I have been focusing on developing countries, we know day care is cited as one of the top reasons why women have been leaving the work force here in the U.S. during the pandemic,” Delecourt said. “Women face constraints due to their gender everywhere in the world. Bridging the gender gap requires a thorough understanding of women’s unique challenges in their specific context.”
Mushamua Mweze at work in the Zola Zola mine, Bukavu, Congo, in 2016. Photo by: J’rgen B’tz/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
An ambitious change in U.S. accounting rules appears to be helping to reduce violent conflicts in Africa, according to a new study.
The conflict minerals disclosure rule, or Dodd-Frank’s Section 1502, required companies as of 2014 to publish detailed reports on their sourcing of tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold. These so-called “conflict minerals,” used in smartphones, laptops, electric vehicles, and other devices, have fueled a humanitarian crisis by serving as a major source of revenue for armed groups in Central Africa.
“With Dodd-Frank, the SEC made an unprecedented move by requiring disclosures intended to tackle issues outside of the shareholder-protection realm,” says Omri Even-Tov, an assistant professor of accounting at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, and co-author of the study.
The hope was that if consumers, investors, employees, and other stakeholders knew more about the conflicts linked to the mining of minerals in the devices they use every day, they would push companies to change their supply chains—and more importantly, that the changes in companies’ mineral-sourcing decisions would reduce funding streams and help alleviate the conflicts.
That seems to be the case. Based on data from the first four years after the conflict minerals disclosure requirement became effective, Even-Tov and colleagues found that companies became substantially more responsible in sourcing minerals. What’s more, their analysis found that the number of conflicts decreased by 15% in the mining regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the nine neighboring countries covered by the disclosure rule, relative to those of countries not covered.
“I don’t want anyone to think that the conflict minerals disclosure rule is a panacea; it’s not,” says Even-Tov, who conducted the study with Bok Baik, a professor at Seoul National University, and PhD students Russell Han, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and David Park, of Seoul National University. “But our results show that increased transparency is effective at nudging companies towards responsible actions that are having a real impact.”
Shifting toward “conflict-free”
The Enough Project, a nonprofit that advocated for Section 1502, estimates that in 2008, a couple of years before the disclosure rule was passed, armed groups in Central Africa earned $185 million from gold as well as tantalum, tin, and tungsten—together known as 3TG minerals.
Rather than impose sanctions on any country or industry, or directly penalize companies sourcing conflict minerals, the U.S. Congress opted to ratchet up transparency. Section 1502 requires SEC-listed firms to file conflict minerals disclosure reports that reveal whether they source 3TG minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo or any of its nine neighboring countries.
The researchers collected data from over 4,000 minerals disclosure reports published by more than 1,000 companies between 2014 and 2018. Because of the conflict minerals disclosure rule, operators of smelters and refiners tend to know about the origins of the minerals they work with and third-party auditors can flag them for links to conflicts or label them as “conflict-free.” Companies are required to conduct due diligence on their supply chains and disclose their findings such as the proportion of conflict-free smelters and refiners in their supply chains.
Responsible sourcing—as measured by the percentage of conflict-free smelters and refiners—improved every year, the researchers found. Over the four-year time period, it nearly doubled, increasing from 44.6% to almost 82%.
Protecting against reputational costs
That raised another important question: Without an enforced penalty for companies that continued to source conflict minerals, what explains such a dramatic shift in behavior?
“We thought it was possible that this came down to perceived reputational cost, which means that employees of the company, customers of the company, and shareholders of the company could be applying pressure,” Even-Tov says.
The researchers found that the more public attention a company’s conflict minerals report garnered, the stronger its commitment to responsible sourcing became. For every 100 downloads of a company’s conflict minerals report, they noted a 1.2% increase in the percentage of conflict-free smelters and refiners and a 4.5% increase in the likelihood that a company would put in place a policy to disassociate from conflict minerals that fund armed groups.
Market reaction also appeared to play a role. Looking at market value over the five days surrounding the publication of a disclosure report, Even-Tov and colleagues found that a one standard-deviation increase in the percentage of conflict-free smelters and refiners that companies sourced from (which amounted to a 24.2% increase the proportion of conflict-free smelters/refiners they used) was associated with a bump of about 0.6% in market value. That equates to $66 million boost for the average company in the sample.
The humanitarian impact
The next question they dug into was whether the new rule was having any bearing on its humanitarian goal of reducing bloodshed. To find out, the researchers drew from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Database to obtain the dates, locations, and types of conflict events between 2010 and 2019.
They divided the entire continent of Africa into roughly ten thousand subnational units and compared changes in conflict incidence around mining areas within covered countries to those in countries not covered by the rule. Conflicts in covered countries’ mining regions fell by an average of about 15% after the disclosure rule went into effect, relative to non-covered countries’ mining regions. They also found that conflicts had not spilled over into non-mining areas.
Transparency’s Delicate Balance
Even-Tov points to these results as robust evidence that the conflict minerals disclosure policy works—and that it should be applied more broadly. For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo supplies most of the world’s cobalt, a mineral not currently mentioned in the rule. He believes cobalt should be added as a conflict mineral.
Still, he acknowledges the need for policymakers to strike a delicate balance with laws requiring more disclosure.
“The problem is that disclosure rules don’t come without costs,” Even-Tov says. “There’s the cost of disclosure for companies and that trickles down to consumers. I think we need to consider the costs when we ask for more disclosures.”
“It’s easy to ask companies to disclose more,” he adds, “but what’s crucial is to measure the impact the disclosures have. That’s what we, as accountants, are endeavoring to do.”
