Aaron Bernstein is a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. He works with the Program’s Pensions and Capital Stewardship Project, which helps public and labor pension funds around the world deal with corporate governance, investment, and fiduciary issues. In 2008, he started the Project’s Investor Initiative, which is developing metrics to assess the long-term portfolio risk of social factors such as labor and human rights and human capital. Such issues are of increasing concern to investors grappling with the importance of a broad range of environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations. Many asset owners and managers believe that ESG factors influence the long-term sustainability of corporations, which in turn helps to determine their profitability and stock performance.

 The Initiative held an inaugural conference in 2009 to discuss the emerging field of social-factor investment analysis and stimulate related research and engagement efforts. It brought together US and European pension funds and other asset owners and managers, investment consultants, investment advisory and research firms, accounting firms, labor and human rights groups, labor unions, and academics.

Bernstein has written three papers for the Initiative: Quantifying Labor and Human Rights Portfolio Risk; Incorporating Labor and Human Rights Risk Into Investment Decisions, and Benchmarking Corporate Policies on Labor and Human Rights in Corporate Supply Chains, written with ASSET4, a Swiss investment research firm.

Bernstein left BusinessWeek magazine in 2006 after a 23-year career as an editor and senior writer covering workplace and social issues, including topics such as labor and human rights, corporate social responsibility and corporate governance. Before joining BusinessWeek, he worked at Forbes Magazine in New York City and for United Press International in London. He received a BA in Politics and Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz and did graduate work in Political and Legal Theory for two years at Oxford University. He is the author of a book entitled “Grounded: Frank Lorenzo and the Destruction of Eastern Airlines,” and the co-author of “In the Company of Owners: The Truth About Stock Options.”

Stephen M. Davis, Ph.D. is Executive Director and Lecturer at the Yale University School of Management’s Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance, a global leader in research and policy programming on capital markets, corporate governance and shareowner stewardship.

Davis is a member of the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor Advisory Committee and chair of its Shareholder as Owner subcommittee; Chair of Hermes EOS, the shareowner engagement arm of Hermes Pensions Management, the UK’s largest retirement fund; Member of the International Advisory Board of NYSE Euronext; Member of the Contributing Committee of Development Partners International; co-chair of the Advisory Board of shareowners.org;  and Member of the advisory board of Cartica Capital. He has chaired the board corporate governance committee of Dubai Group, the investment arm of Dubai Holdings, a sovereign wealth fund.

Dr. Davis co-authored (with Jon Lukomnik and David Pitt-Watson) The New Capitalists: How Citizen Investors are Reshaping the Corporate Agenda (Harvard Business School Press, 2006), which was named by the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Australian Financial Review as one of the best business books of 2006. Davis is President of consultant Davis Global Advisors, and founder-editor of Global Proxy Watch.

Davis co-chaired The Conference Board’s Working Group on Hedge Funds and served on the US National Association of Corporate Directors’ Blue Ribbon Commission on board-shareholder communications. He has testified at US congressional hearings,  advised the UK Treasury and Department of Trade & Industry, been a columnist for the Financial Times and Compliance Week, and is a frequent media commentator on corporate governance. Named twice by Directorship as among the 100 most influential figures in corporate governance, Davis is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts.

Davis pioneered the field of international corporate governance when in 1988 he founded the global unit at the IRRC, in Washington, DC. His Shareholder Rights Abroad: A Handbook for the Global Investor (1989) was the first study comparing corporate governance practices in top markets. Dr. Davis is a co-founder of the International Corporate Governance Network, and served as its governor between 2000 and 2003. He was named as ICGN representative to the OECD. Dr. Davis was a founding member of the UNEP steering group which authored the Principles for Responsible Investment and a contributor to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Policy Network working group on economic reform. He co-founded GovernanceMetrics International and g3, a partnership that consulted to the World Bank.

Dr. Davis earned his doctorate in international business and security studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and completed undergraduate studies at Tufts and the London School of Economics. Other books include Apartheid’s Rebels: Inside South Africa’s Hidden War (Yale University Press, 1987), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.