Assistant Professor Kenneth Khoo wins AsLEA Prize

Over the past decade, a growing number of investors have been using their power to push companies to become more environmentally and socially responsible. But recently, that support seems to be on the decline.

The findings, based on research into examining whether the waning support is linked to a 2021 shift in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) policy, are detailed in NUS Law Assistant Professor Kenneth Khoo’s paper, “Expanding Shareholder Voice: The Impact of SEC Guidance on Environmental and Social Proposals”, which won the Best Paper Award for Junior Scholars at the Asian Law and Economics Association 2025 Annual Conference (AsLEA) in August 2025.

Co-written by Assistant Professor Kenneth Khoo and Assistant Professor Roberto Tallarita of Harvard Law School, this is the second time the strength of the paper has been acknowledged. It won the Best Academic Paper award on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) in the Junior category at the 2024 Berkeley-ECGI Forum on Corporate Governance in November last year.

Their research found that while most investors still support a company’s move towards being more responsible, the financial cost of prescriptive environmental and social (E&S) proposals—which typically call for more aggressive but costlier E&S policies by companies—is making them think twice.

Assistant Professor Khoo elaborated, “The paper exploits a 2021 natural experiment in which the US SEC expanded the scope for shareholder activists to submit E&S proposals. Although this reform broadened shareholder voice on ‘green’ and other pro-social issues, we show that shareholders rejected ‘prescriptive’ proposals en masse, with voting support falling well before the rise of the Trump administration.”

The methodological contribution is also notable. The authors used observed SEC decisions to establish the ground truth for what constitutes a “prescriptive” proposal and then trained a supervised machine-learning model to classify thousands of additional proposals. This approach has multiple applications beyond corporate and securities law.

On his win, Assistant Professor Khoo said, “I’m proud to help strengthen NUS’ reputation in the field of law and economics. NUS already has many excellent economists in its economics department and business school, but fewer of us specialise in the intersection of law and economics. Yet, law could soon become one of the most exciting areas for groundbreaking research, especially as artificial intelligence is now enabling us to analyse huge amounts of previously untapped data.”