The focus on environmental, social and governance practices is expanding to companies’ supply chains—and with good reason. Not only does responsible sourcing and greater disclosure of supply-chain risks benefit society, such practices can benefit shareholders, too.

Information on ESG-related issues along supply chains has been hard to come by and difficult to collect. I teamed up with Xuanpu Lin and Guoman She of the University of Hong Kong Business School and Haoran Zhu of China’s Southern University of Science and Technology to create a data set that would allow us to examine what it means for shareholders when a company embraces ethical sourcing.

Read more from The Wall Street Journal.