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Research England have in place an open access mandate as part of REF 2021 and REF 2027. Currently, the REF open access mandate only applies to journal articles and proceedings with an ISSN.

For a research output to be eligible for the next REF, authors’ final peer-reviewed (author-accepted) manuscripts must be deposited in LBS Research Online as soon after the date of acceptance as possible and no later than three months after acceptance . The Acceptance date is based on the letter or e-mail from the publication to author.  Embargo period(s) and copyright

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The Research Excellence Framework is the way the United Kingdom assesses the quality of research in higher education institutions. The first REF took place in 2014 and the subsequent REF was completed in 2021. The results of REF 2021 are expected to be released in May 2022.

The School are currently in the REF cycle, after REF 2021, that is expected to assess research quality from 2021-2027. 

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Research papers need to be deposited in a repository within 3 months of the date of acceptance as confirmed in a letter or email from your publisher. If that does not happen, it opens up the possibility of the research paper not being eligible for the REF.

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The End of ESG

Financial Management 52(1), 3-17, Spring 2023

31 Pages Posted: 22 Sep 2022 Last revised: 19 Dec 2023

Alex Edmans

London Business School - Institute of Finance and Accounting; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI); Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Date Written: January 4, 2023

ESG is both extremely important and nothing special. It's extremely important because it's critical to long-term value, and so any practitioner or academic should take it seriously, not just those with "ESG" in their job title or list of research interests. Thus, ESG doesn't need a specialized term, as that implies it's niche. Considering long-term factors when valuing a company isn’t ESG investing; it’s investing. It's nothing special since it's no better or worse than other intangible assets that drive long-term value and create positive externalities for wider society, such as management quality, corporate culture, and innovative capability. The following implications follow: 1. Companies shouldn't be praised more for improving their ESG performance than these other intangibles; investor engagement on ESG factors shouldn't be put on a pedestal compared to engagement on other value drivers. We want great companies, not just companies that are great at ESG. 2. Investors who greenwash are correctly being held to account. But so should other investors who fail to walk the talk, such as actively-managed funds that closet index or systematically underperform. Clients of non-ESG funds deserve the same protection as clients of ESG funds. 3. Practitioners shouldn’t rush to do something special for ESG factors that they wouldn’t for other drivers of value, such as demand that every company tie executive pay to them, force a firm to report them even if not relevant for its particular business, or reduce complex intangibles to simple quantitative metrics. 4. Many of the controversies surrounding ESG become moot when we view it as a set of long-term value factors. It’s no surprise that ESG ratings aren’t perfectly correlated, because it’s legitimate to have different views on the quality of a company’s intangibles. We don’t need to get into angry fights between ESG believers and deniers, nor politicize the issues, because reasonable people can disagree on how relevant a characteristic is for a company’s long-term success.

Keywords: ESG, CSR, responsible business, sustainable investing, intangible assets, externalities

JEL Classification: D62, G11, G34

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Alex Edmans (Contact Author)

London business school - institute of finance and accounting ( email ).

Sussex Place Regent's Park London NW1 4SA United Kingdom

European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) ( email )

c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) ( email )

London United Kingdom

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Relevance gap in business school research: which academic papers are cited in managerial bridge journals?

The much-discussed ‘relevance gap’ (Starkey and Madan, 2001) between research and practice in management is a major source of concern for business schools, in terms of their legitimacy in the eyes of students, employers and funding bodies. In this paper, we frame the relevance gap as a knowledge-transfer issue, and we focus on the role of “bridging media” as one possible mechanism through which academic research is made accessible to practising managers. Specifically, we ask two questions: (1) which academic research is selected for dissemination by bridging media? And (2) how can we develop better ways of measuring this type of bridging activity? Through a preliminary empirical analysis (of the citation trails from 264 academic papers to bridge journals such as Sloan Management Review), we identify the key characteristics of papers that are picked up in bridging media, and we describe how our methodology could be extended to contribute to Aguinis et al’s (2014) pluralist conceptualization of scholarly impact

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