Our analysis is based on a database of approximately 47,000 sustainability-related announcements issued by the world’s 1,000 largest public companies from January 2015 through December 2022. We linked each announcement to the relevant company’s daily relative total shareholder return (rTSR) for the period starting three days prior to and ending ten days after the announcement. We calculated rTSR using the relevant regional index (S&P 500, FTSE UK, FTSE Australia, MSCI Europe, and MSCI FM Asia) after tests of sector-specific or other benchmarks did not yield significantly different results.

Our research and hypotheses were derived from earlier BCG global research, as well as related findings from country-based or regional studies in Australia, France, and Scandinavia. We took a number of steps to mitigate the effects of confounding drivers of rTSR: using short-term returns (three days post-announcement) as our metric for value creation, merging multiple related announcements on a single day, excluding announcements within three days of earnings calls/investor days, and excluding data from March through December 2020 because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on stock markets. This yielded a dataset of about 14,000 announcements to analyze.

We then tagged each announcement in our global dataset to indicate which of seven business case elements identified in earlier global, regional, and country-level research were included. We used natural-language processing to tag the full dataset and then ran manual checks on all announcements in three sectors—mining, auto, and consumer products—to verify accuracy.