Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility: Company & Industry Background

This page supports UCSD courses and researchers on topics related to ethical management and business practices. It includes resources about social entrepreneurship, CSR and ESG information.

Company Descriptions & Key Background Information

Mergent Online
Provides detailed information about U.S. and International public companies. Content includes: links to SEC EDGAR filings, current and archived company profiles and annual reports, historical financial and stock price data, financial ratios, equity research reports, and industry reports. **This resource will be replaced by Mergent Market Atlas in June 2025.
Gale Business Insights
GBI is a great first-stop for business and management information. It includes information on companies and industries from business and trade journals, academic journals, industry reports, newspapers, newsletters, and classic business reference sources. Search on a company name. In the search results, click on individual companies to open well-organized company profiles.
Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni contains thousands of full-text sources including newspapers, news wires, television news transcripts, newsletters, magazines, and trade journals. Business sources include company information, industry news, and biographical information. Legal sources include law reviews, legal reference works, and federal and state caselaw (court decisions), statutes, and regulations. Also includes select international court opinions and municipal ordinances. Coverage dates vary. International and U.S. sources.
Factiva
Provides access to over 16,000 global sources including: * 1,000+ Global and local newspapers * 3,000+ Journals and magazines * 30,000+ Company Reports. Factiva.com delivers content in 27 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese.
Scroll down on the landing page to the Newsstand: US section for the latest content of Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Barron's & more.

Identify Competitors Quickly

Hoover's Company Profiles in Nexis Uni Nexis Uni yields a number of useful results, including our online access to Hoover's Company Profiles, which contain background on companies and their operations, plus lists their key executives, product lines and key competitors..

Gale Business Insights GBI is a great first-stop for business and management information. It includes information on companies and industries from business and trade journals, academic journals, industry reports, newspapers, newsletters, and classic business reference sources. Search on a company name. In the search results, click on individual companies to open well-organized company profiles.
Mergent Online Provides detailed information about U.S. and International public companies. Content includes: links to SEC EDGAR filings, current and archived company profiles and annual reports, historical financial and stock price data, financial ratios, equity research reports, and industry reports. **This resource will be replaced by Mergent Market Atlas in June 2025.
IBISWorld Industry Intelligence IBISWorld contains U.S. and global industry market research reports, including a specialized collection of China Industry Reports. It also provides U.S. business risk ratings, and selected economic and demographic data. Contents are downloadable as full reports or selected elements, such as SWOT analyses, statistical tables and graphs.

ESG Data Sources

Our ESG data comes hosted on two platforms:LSEG Refinitiv Workspace and Mergent Market Atlas. The data are from the same source. Mergent has easy-to-access, overall reporting. It's great for tracking overall company and peer performance. LSEG Refinitiv gets more granular on specific factors that make up the ESG pillars. Not everyone will need that level of granularity.

Mergent Market Atlas
**This resource will replace Mergent Online in June 2025. It provides access to company financials, ratios, business segments, descriptions, sustainability, officers and directors. It is especially useful for company, industry, index, ESG and economic data views and reports.
LSEG Refinitiv Workspace
Although Workspace primarily provides financial and economic data, news, equity reports, and company & industry analysis, it also features unique content about companies’ ESG performance, sustainable leadership monitoring (SLM), and peer analysis. First-time users register here, https://my.refinitiv.com/productregistration.html (ESG data is in the basic license, called “Workspace for Students”).
Workspace is only available to UC San Diego students, faculty, and staff; only for non-commercial, academic research. It replaces ThomsonONE/Investext and Datastream, and now works across several browsers.

Register only once; otherwise login to Workspace using the main link. You may use web or desktop app version (includes the Workspace add-in for Excel), once you are registered.

Sustainability Rankings & Performance Sources

The Stakeholder Takeover Project
This free website provides rankings of some of the Fortune 500 companies on greenhouse gas emissions and transparency.
Ceres' SEC Sustainability Disclosures Tool
Reports depict how companies are tackling material risks and opportunities they face from sustainability issues like climate change and water availability and quality. It also helps you uncover: Which companies report on these issues in SEC filings? How much—and what—do they say? Has their disclosure changed over time?
The Corporate Register
Global coverage of corporate responsibility reports. Free sign up gives limited access.
100 Best Corporate Citizens (May 2023)
This annual list, produced by Corporate Responsibility Officer magazine, ranks companies’ performance in eight categories. The scores draw on both financial information and measures of corporate social performance.
B Corp
All about B Corps, which are small to mid-sized companies that intentionally balance sustainability and profits. Site includes a director of companies with the certification.

BMI Country Risk Global & All Industry Global
BMI provides proprietary data, analyst reports, ratings, rankings, and forecasts covering 175 countries and 25 industry sectors. Login path: choose SSO > Organization ID = UCSD. BMI includes lengthy country and industry reports, financial markets and commodities coverage, plus newsletters and daily alerts.
OECD iLibrary
OECD iLibrary is the Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development's Online Library for Books, Papers and Statistics and the gateway to its analysis and data. Coverage includes development, economics, education, energy, environment, scitech, social issues, and more.

World Resources Institute
Has a wide-ranging website with international resources, reports, graphics, data and videos on all aspects of sustainability.
World Bank's ESG Databank
The ESG dataset provides a collection of national-level indicators for sustainable investment analysis, based on a draft framework of 17 key sustainability criteria. The indicators are drawn from multiple World Bank databases and external data providers.

General Industry Overviews

These resources are the best first-stops for overviews on industries.

IBISWorld Industry Intelligence IBISWorld contains U.S. and global industry market research reports, including a specialized collection of China Industry Reports. It also provides U.S. business risk ratings, and selected economic and demographic data. Contents are downloadable as full reports or selected elements, such as SWOT analyses, statistical tables and graphs.
Gale Business Insights GBI is a great first-stop for business and management information. It includes information on companies and industries from business and trade journals, academic journals, industry reports, newspapers, newsletters, and classic business reference sources. Search on a company name. In the search results, click on individual companies to open well-organized company profiles.
EMIS Next Academic Research (formerly EMIS Intelligence) Provides economic studies, company & industry reports, country risk, economic and industrial statistics, and political news with a focus on emerging market countries. Covers public & private companies & global industry reports. Includes interactive data analysis tools & news alerts. Excellent China coverage.
LSEG Refinitiv Workspace Workspace provides financial and economic data, news, equity reports, and company & industry analysis. Its international in scope and covers both public and private company information. Workspace is most often used for investment analysts’ reports, public company financials & filings, business news, economic indicators, stock prices, and data, and a variety of instruments (bonds, commodities, currencies, ETFs, futures, indexes, options and more). Unique content includes ESG data, performance forecasts & consensus estimates, deals & transactions (M&A, IPOs, venture capital & private equity). Download limit of 150 pages per day, reset daily at midnight local time. New users complete self-registration here - https://my.refinitiv.com/productregistration.html
Workspace is only available to UC San Diego students, faculty, and staff; only for non-commercial, academic research. It replaces ThomsonONE/Investext and Datastream, and now works across several browsers.

Register only once; otherwise login to Workspace using the main link. You may use web or desktop app version (includes the Workspace add-in for Excel), once you are registered.

Customer Demographics Sources

SimplyAnalytics An easy to use mapping, analytics, and data visualization app with 100,000+ data variables, including demographic data from the US Census, and the American Community Survey (ACS), consumer spending data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), 2020 Election Data, and D&B's Points-of-Interest business directory providing access to over 5 million US business profiles. The included MRI-SimmonsLOCAL consumer behavior dataset contains data on over 8,000 brands, 450 categories, the MOSAIC segmentation system, and detailed lifestyle information. Community Lifestages presents data based on Householder Age, Income and Household Family Status. Users also have access to the CDC PLACES health dataset which includes 27 diverse health measures, such as Health Outcomes, Prevention, Risk Behaviors, and Health Status. Data is largely available down to the block group level, and custom locations can be created. Includes EASI/MediaMark Research Incorporated (MRI) and Simmons LOCAL data packages. Data is downloadable in GIS-ready shapefiles. Users may log in as a Guest, or create an account to save their work. Access limited to 5 simultaneous users. Try again later if refused. (formerly known as SimplyMap).
Passport GMID: Global Market Information Database Passport GMID is a product from Euromonitor International that provides reports and statistics on international consumers and markets, including details about consumer market segmentation, industry forecasts, consumer spending and attitudes, and macroeconomic and business trends. It's also a great source to download demographic information to show timeline trends. Coverage is global (200+ countries).