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Philipp Reichel, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg; Nadine Gatzert, Friedrich-Alexaner University Erlangen-Nürnberg
Sustainable investing has become increasingly relevant in the last years, mainly driven by environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns as well as regulation and public initiatives. In this paper, we study the development of the awareness and relevance of sustainable investing in the European and US insurance industry in detail as reflected in their reports. The sample consists of 727 annual, sustainability- and investment-related reports and documents of 55 firms from 2013 to 2017. Our text mining approach shows an increasing awareness of sustainable investing over the last years as reflected in the insurers’ reports. Impact investing and ESG integration are the most important strategies during the sample period, especially for life & health insurers, while screening strategies are less referenced (and mostly by P&C insurers). Furthermore, while the ranking of terms and strategies is overall similar in the US and European sample, European insurers report much more extensively about sustainable investing, also in their annual reports. Finally, we observe a strong increase in the relative importance of sustainable investment approaches in terms of the proportion of word count relative to the total number of words in reports as well as investment references.
