The Massachusetts state pension fund is teaming up with the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative to try to improve the data available to investors who want to make decisions based on things like the way a company treats its workers, its carbon emissions or its product safety record.

As socially responsible investing expands rapidly across the globe, the Aggregate Confusion Project with the Pension Reserves Investment Management Board aims to cut through the noise around Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data, which many investors looking to achieve financial and social returns use to screen potential investments.

“How can we eliminate discrimination in the labor force if we always measure too late? How can industries produce safer goods and services for consumers and the environment if we can’t agree on how to size their impact? If businesses, consumers, governments, and investors want to make decisions based on ESG, we need to provide them with unified guidance,” Roberto Rigobon, professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said. “This is the purpose of the Aggregate Confusion Project.”

The PRIM board, which manages the $75 billion Pension Reserves Investment Trust Fund, is the founding member of the project. Jason Jay, director of the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, said pension funds like PRIM have “a unique vantage point on the challenges of integrating ESG into the investment process, and the importance of solving the measurement problem.” He said PRIM could “help inform our research questions and methodology and be a testbed for innovative approaches.”

More than $30 trillion of assets worldwide rely on ESG data, up 34 percent from 2016, according to MIT and PRIM. But ESG ratings “diverge substantially” from rating agency to rating agency, the organizations said, leading to “significant, realworld consequences.”

“As an investor, the discrepancies in ratings from agency to agency makes evaluating a company’s ESG impact extremely challenging,” PRIM Executive Director Michael Trotsky said. “We hope that this project will reinvigorate the debate on how to improve those ratings, and we’re looking forward to being a part of the membership council, which will collaborate on implementation strategies.”

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