ESG valuation: a web scraping approach.

Abstract

The investment industry and the investors in the recent years have raised the demand for financial instruments of companies that are environmentally, socially responsible and have good governance practices. This thesis aims to evaluate the level of ESG responsible activities of targeted companies through a web scraping method. The bots created with Python programming language are used to retrive all the text from the sustainability web pages of the single companies. The text retrieved is analyzed and the relation with financial performances is measured. The method proposed helps to assign a ESG score to companies that are not currently rated by ESG rating agencies.