Material sustainability and stock return: faith is not enough

Abstract

Yoon and Serafeim (2022) provide a review of the history of materiality, a brief discussion of selected research, and a discourse on measurement noise.  They do not address the results of our research, our critique of their analysis, or our evidence that the main finding of Khan, Yoon, and Serafeim (2016) is a statistical artifact. In total, their response illustrates the danger of placing excessive faith in the findings from a single study.