Dr Seema Arora is a PhD economist and the nation’s leading expert on ESG issues. She has conducted pioneering research for over 20+ years. Her dissertation titled, “Voluntary Overcompliance with Environmental Standards: Theory and Empirical Evidence” showed that the environment could be a business opportunity and that business is an important part of solving environmental problems. The research predicted that companies would make voluntary pledges to reduce their environmental footprint. Using the first corporate sustainability public disclosure data, along with her co-author, she conducted a data-driven evaluation of the USEPA’s first voluntary public-private partnership with industry that aimed to reduce toxic emissions. According to the USEPA Administrator, her evaluation influenced the design of 5 nation-wide voluntary programs. It heralded a new approach to regulation through public disclosure and voluntary public-private partnerships that were deployed by the World Bank, OECD, and NAFTA countries as well as by 1000 largest Chinese companies’ program.
Subsequently and as early as 2000, before any institutional interest, she analyzed the impact of a company’s pro-active sustainability actions on the stock market performance. In the context of what is now profit-with purpose, she framed the problem in the context of short-run and the long-run impacts. Using data from publicly traded companies, she found that while gains were elusive in the short run, companies that were pro-active in their sustainability actions also outperformed their counterparts in the long run. She is recognized for her thought leadership by top Fortune 500 C-leadership including by McKinsey and Unilever.
She co-developed and taught a cross-functional sustainability curriculum comprising of 4 courses to over 1200 MBA students at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University. The curriculum was ranked as one of the top 3 programs in the country by Business Week. She is a Google Scholar with over 3000+ primary citations and over 50,000 secondary citations for her seminal contributions in the field of ESG.
Dr Arora obtained her PhD from the University of Southern California. She was a Gilbert White Fellow at Resources for the Future and served as a Consultant for World Bank. She was Assistant Professor at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University and has held visiting positions at Stanford University during which time she served as Designate Expert on a fintech project with the Reserve Bank of India. She is a two-time recipient of National Science Foundation funding. She is a Founder of CRIDEE in Palo Alto.