Why sustainable business needs better ESG ratings
Data on environmental, social, and governance performance is noisy — and may not help companies help the environment. MIT Sloan experts investigate.
Faculty
Roberto Rigobon is the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.
Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. Roberto focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation. He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.
Roberto joined the business school in 1997 and has won both the "Teacher of the Year" award and the "Excellence in Teaching" award at MIT three times.
He received his PhD in economics from MIT in 1997, an MBA from IESA (Venezuela) in 1991, and his BS in Electrical Engineer from Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela) in 1984. He is married with three kids.
Berg, Florian, Julian F Kölbel, and Roberto Rigobon. Review of Finance. Forthcoming.
Jiang, Bomin, Daniel Rigobon, and Roberto Rigobon. IMF Economic Review Vol. 70, No. 1 (2022): 141-184. Download Paper.
Berg, Florian, Julian F Kölbel, Anna Pavlova, and Roberto Rigobon, MIT Sloan Working Paper 6483-21. Cambridge, MA: MIT Sloan School of Management, October 2021.
Rigobon, Roberto. MIT Sloan Management Review, August 30, 2021.
Casarin, Roberto, Matteo Iacopini, German Molina, Enrique ter Horst, Ramon Espinasa, Carlos Sucre, and Roberto Rigobon. Econometrics Journal Vol. 23, No. 2 (2020): 269-296. Download Paper.
Rigobon, Roberto. Economia Vol. 19, No. 2 (2019): 69-99. Download Paper.
Data on environmental, social, and governance performance is noisy — and may not help companies help the environment. MIT Sloan experts investigate.
Here are four tenets from MIT Sloan on how to build a sustainable business practice.
A further market distortion arises from what academics Florian Berg, Julian Kölbel and Roberto Rigobon call “aggregate confusion."
A new paper highlights just how tricky it is to come up with an objective, rigorous ESG investing framework.
"Investors should purchase stocks from established companies—such as supermarkets—whose revenues are indexed to the inflation rate."
"The Big Mac Index from The Economist is probably the simplest statistic ever created. Sadly, for the World Bank, it is just as good as the PPP.”
This eight-week online program offers you the opportunity to explore macroeconomics from a business perspective, guided by renowned economist Professor Roberto Rigobon.
For many companies, the topic of sustainability is at the forefront of business agendas. Consumers and stakeholders are demanding greater accountability from organizations, and the regulatory environment is becoming increasingly stringent. However, pursuing the environmental, social, and governance impacts of business is often met with tension. Leaders now need to manage the misconception within business that meeting sustainability goals means compromising profits.