The Department of Accounting is delighted to announce that Dr Xi Li and Dr Tommaso Palermo, both Associate Professors of Accounting, have been awarded funding as part of the Global Sustainability Research Fund (GSRF), administered by LSE’s Global School of Sustainability (GSoS). They are two of just 13 recipients selected to share nearly £800,000 in support of innovative sustainability-focused research projects.
The GSRF is LSE’s flagship initiative for advancing ambitious, interdisciplinary research that tackles critical sustainability challenges. Drawing on the School’s strengths across the social sciences, the fund supports projects with the potential for high academic and real-world impact.
Dr Xi Li’s project, "Creating Sustainable Finance and Business," proposes a novel approach to evaluating sustainability commitment in asset management by analyzing hiring practices as a signal of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) integration. This project addresses a central and urgent question in sustainable finance: how to distinguish asset managers genuinely committed ESG principles from those engaging in greenwashing. It is designed to offer empirical clarity on a high-stakes question: what does a genuine commitment to sustainable finance look like inside the black box of an asset management firm?
Dr Tommaso Palermo’s project, "Translating Nature into Risk: The Role of Financial Disclosure Frameworks in Shaping Nature-Related Risks," examines how data-driven governance and financial reporting frameworks help translate complex and uncertain phenomena - such as biodiversity loss - into recognizable categories of organizational risk, including financial, operational, and reputational risks. It also investigates how this translation process may facilitate the integration of nature-related concerns into existing corporate risk management practices.
These projects reflect the Department’s strong engagement with accounting, finance and sustainability, and its commitment to addressing pressing global issues through rigorous, socially relevant research.