Who Audits the Auditor?: Shaping Legal Accountability Strategies to Redress Social Audit Failings

March 30, 2021

(Business & Human Rights Resource Centre) Current due diligence efforts by companies have not been enough to prevent labour exploitation. One reason is that companies overly rely on social audits1 to identify labour abuse in their supply chains, despite well-documented shortcomings. For example, social audits only provide a periodic snapshot of a situation, rely on…

Opinion | The $15 Minimum Wage Isn’t the Only Way to Raise Worker Pay

March 29, 2021

(Politico) To the disappointment of many on the left, President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 relief package did not include an increase in the federal minimum wage, dimming the prospect of setting a national wage floor at $15. But there is another step the administration can take to push companies to pay more: disclosure. Read more here.

SEC: Public Input Welcomed on Climate Change Disclosures

March 15, 2021

(SEC) In light of demand for climate change information and questions about whether current disclosures adequately inform investors, public input is requested from investors, registrants, and other market participants on climate change disclosure.

The Ethics of VC

March 11, 2021

(Medium) Why ESG for VCs now? While nine months ago, many VC funds wouldn’t even have known what ESG might mean for them, there has been a wave of initiatives going through the industry recently.

Senators to put Robinhood model under microscope again at GameStop hearing

March 8, 2021

(Market Watch) Expect a focus on the pitfalls of financial speculation. Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and a longtime critic of Wall Street, will oversee the questioning of several witnesses who will paint the sudden rise and extreme volatility in meme stocks like GameStop Corp as evidence of the need for fundamental…

Google told its scientists to ‘strike a positive tone’ in AI research – documents

December 23, 2020

(Reuters) Alphabet Inc’s Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists’ papers by launching a “sensitive topics” review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work. Read more here.

Interview: Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures)

December 21, 2020

(ClimateTech VC) This week we sat down with Albert Wenger, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, who Zoomed in from his “farm of the future” in Hudson Valley, Wally Farms. USV invests thematically across big fund theses like “large networks” and “decentralized data.” Recently, they’ve started to develop an adjacent thesis on climate change’s potential…

Global sustainability and integrated reporting organizations launch prototype climate-related financial disclosure standard

December 18, 2020

(Integrated Reporting) Five leading organizations in sustainability and integrated reporting, who published a shared vision for a comprehensive corporate reporting system earlier this year, have taken a next practical step together. Today, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement on 12 December, the group published a paper that addresses one part of this…

Opinion: A surprise about some ESG funds — they actually vote against environmental and socially conscious resolutions

December 18, 2020

(MarketWatch) New research shows that some index funds with an environmental, social and corporate governance mandate rarely vote in favor of their stated preferences.

The Agriculture Industry Didn’t Have a Data Platform – So She Created One

November 30, 2020

(Inc.) Gro Intelligence’s software helps power the multitrillion-dollar agriculture industry. Ticker prices and stock symbols surrounded Sara Menker when she worked as a commodities trader in the 2000s. But she noticed one field was lacking in data: agriculture. “Nearly every part of our lives depends on this multitrillion-dollar industry,” she says, “and it didn’t have…