Inside the
Ethics Premium
How highly ethical companies
outperform and outlast
Companies with strong ethics and compliance programs outperformed a global benchmark by 8.2 percentage points over five years and demonstrated greater resilience through volatility, with smaller drawdowns and faster recovery.
Appendix
Inside the 2026
The 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies® honorees outperformed the market over the last five years and recovered faster through volatile periods. The Ethics Premium reinforces a simple point for leadership teams: organizations that invest in ethics and compliance deliver strong results over time and show resilience during periods of market disruption. The business case is straightforward: strong programs help reduce surprises, strengthen decision-making, and protect trust, all of which support durable performance.
The Ethics Premium is a five-year lookback that compares the publicly listed 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies honoree cohort to the Solactive GBS Global Markets All Cap USD Index (Total Return), a global benchmark used to represent the broader investable equity market across sectors. This provides a high-level signal of how ethics-leading companies performed across a full market cycle, including both expansion and contraction.
The Ethics Premium reflects correlation, not causation. Market performance is shaped by many variables, and no single factor explains outcomes. World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees earn recognition based on the strength of their ethics, compliance, culture, and governance practices, not financial results. The Ethics Premium shows that, over time, these companies deliver stronger performance and greater resilience than the benchmark.
Organizations recognized for leading in ethics and compliance delivered higher returns with less downside and faster recoveries. The business case is straightforward. Strong programs reduce surprises, strengthen decision-making, protect trust, and safeguard intangible assets—all of which support durable performance.
Jan 1, 2021–Dec 31, 2025
Smaller max drawdown than the broader market
Faster return to prior peak than the broader market
Less time spent below the prior peak than the broader market
Publicly listed 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees displayed stronger share price growth compared to a broad global benchmark by 8.2 percentage points over the five-year period from 2021–2025. The gap is meaningful, and the more board-relevant story sits beneath the headline. The same dataset highlights how the cohort behaved when conditions turned, including the depth of declines and the speed of recovery.
Five-year share price outperformance vs. global benchmark
When markets decline, stakeholders and boards focus on two questions: how much value was lost, and how quickly momentum returned. Across the deepest stress periods of the last five years, the 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies cohort showed smaller downside impact and faster recovery than the benchmark. Honorees experienced a 7.1% smaller maximum drawdown, returned to prior highs 10.1% faster, and spent 14.4% less time below their prior peak. During a key stress month in September 2022, the cohort declined 12.5% less than the benchmark.
Max Drawdown
smaller worst-case drop
Time Underwater
less time below prior peak
Recovery Time
faster return to prior highs
Stress Month
September 2022: declined 12.5% less than benchmark
Across the last five years, the 2026 World’s Most Ethical Companies cohort captured more of the market’s upside and less of its downside. This provides a useful, board-level shorthand: ethics-leading organizations can remain competitive when markets rise, while showing comparatively less exposure when markets fall.
Up Capture
Down Capture
Footnote: Capture compares how the cohort performs in up or down months relative to the benchmark (97% down capture means the cohort experienced ~97% of the benchmark’s losses in down months).
The Ethics Premium isn’t dependent on a single moment in time. Across rolling 12-month windows, the cohort showed positive excess return in 65% of periods (31 of 48 windows), reflecting a durable relationship between leading programs and stronger results across macroeconomic cycles.
Positive excess return in
of rolling 12-month windows in the last five years
Modern enterprise value is increasingly driven by intangibles such as trust, reputation, culture, confidential company information, and the ability to operate through disruption.
By the end of 2025, global consulting firm Ocean Tomo estimates that intangible assets represented ~92% of S&P 500 market capitalization, a dramatic shift in what markets reward.
So, how do best-in-class programs build the formal and informal systems that protect and empower the intangible assets that drive success? The World’s Most Ethical Companies show what that looks like in practice.
This is the 20th annual recognition of companies that demonstrate a commitment to ethical business practices through programs that positively impact employees, communities, and stakeholders. This cohort is the basis for the Ethics Premium and the program benchmarks that follow.
See the List
Honorees
Countries
Industries
Publicly Traded
The World’s Most Ethical Companies evaluation is built on the Ethics Quotient®, a 240+ question assessment of the features that consistently demonstrate high-signal indicators of program maturity:
Governance
Program Structure
Written Standards
Training, Awareness, and Communication
Risk Assessment and Detection
Enforcement, Discipline, and Incentives
Measurement of Ethical Culture
Third Party Risk Management
Impact Assessment and Reporting
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To increase employee trust in speaking up, 75% of honorees are sharing investigation and discipline statistics with all employees – a 6 percentage point gain over the last three years.
To capture employee attention, a majority of honorees are allowing test-out, test-up or progressive course difficulty in online training.
To leverage their culture carriers effectively, nearly every honoree is equipping managers with toolkits, talk tracks and other resources to discuss ethical dilemmas with their teams – and 51% require managers to do so.
Honorees are raising the bar and setting the standard for E&C programs around the world. Here are the expectations we’re seeing accelerate most quickly across leading programs.
Improved board reporting practices overall, including more frequent meetings with directors to make sure they're getting the information they need to engage in effective oversight.
Widespread use of root-cause taxonomy to analyze and address compliance issues – and learn from them.
Formal policies that are clear, compelling, informative, and inspirational – and ready for AI-driven assistance to help employees find the answers they need.
Innovative, employee-centric test-out procedures boost knowledge retention and employee engagement.
In an uncertain world roiled with upheaval and transformation, the Ethics Premium provides the most compelling proof that an ethics-driven strategy produces strong organizational outcomes, no matter what the wider world throws our way.
Such robust ethical ecosystems result from long-term intent and investment. And in a world driven by short-term results, the Ethics Premium shields organizations against harmfully expedient strategic thinking.
But the Ethics Premium is just a start.
With this data to show how valuable an investment in ethics really is, it also opens the door to maximizing that return and accelerating an organization's ethics maturity journey. Use these insights to engage your strategic partners in a sustained, data-driven conversation about how to deepen and maximize your organization’s investment in integrity.
