ESG Risk: Lessons Learned from Utility Theory

Abstract: We propose a new class of monetary risk measures capable of assessing financial and ESG risk. The construction of these risk measures is based on an extension of classical shortfall risk measures in which the loss function is replaced by a multi-attribute utility function. We present an extensive theoretical analysis of these risk measures, showing in particular how properties of the utility function translate into properties of the associated risk measure. We furthermore discuss how these multi-attribute risk measures can be used to compute minimum risk portfolios and show in a numerical study that accounting for ESG risk in optimal portfolio choice has a significant influence on the composition of portfolios.