Evolutions in Sustainable Investing

Evolutions in Sustainable Investing
Author: Cary Krosinsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2011-12-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0470888490

Sustainable Investing is fast becoming an essential method of generating long-term returns, moving beyond the negative approaches to socially responsible investing that have dominated the field. This book, our second on the subject, provides over 15 case studies of leading global investors and companies demonstrating how they successfully apply sustainability aspects to their core strategies. Learn from prominent thought leaders Dan Esty and Paul Hawken among others who have contributed key chapters. Our chapter on performance shows clearly how these strategies have been working once negative approaches are parsed out by those examining fund returns. This book also examines in great depth what data exists, and what's on the horizon, to best measure & capture sustainability successfully. Regional perspectives, including 3 chapters on Asia, and focuses on Canada, Australia, Africa & India are also included, as is a look across asset classes. Sustainable Investing, when performed with a positive perspective, has been outperforming the mainstream, unlike negative approaches designed to match benchmark returns. From eco-efficiency to sustainability-driven innovation and beyond, investors of all shapes & sizes need to know how best to position themselves for the radical market shifts underway.

Values at Work

Values at Work
Author: Daniel C. Esty
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030556131

Sustainable investing is a rapidly growing and evolving field. With investors expressing ever greater interest in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics and reporting, companies face a sustainability imperative and the need to remake their business models to respond to an array of pressing issues including climate change, air and water pollution, racial justice, workplace diversity, economic inequality, privacy, corporate integrity, and good governance. From equities to fixed income and from private equity to impact-investing, investors of all kinds now want to understand which companies will be marketplace leaders in a business future redefined by sustainability. Thus, investment strategies, risk models, financial vehicles, applications, data, metrics, standards, and regulations are all changing rapidly around the world. In an effort to better understand the current status and movement of this dynamic field and to provide a practical reference for the growing pool of investors, financial advisors, companies, and academics seeking information on sustainable investing and ESG reporting, this edited book covers the latest trends, tools, and thinking. It showcases the work of authors from leading companies and academic institutions across a range of vital topics such as financial disclosure, portfolio assessment, ESG metrics construction, and law as well as regulation. Readers of the book will be better able to identify and address the hurdles to moving mainstream capital toward more sustainable companies, investments, and projects.

Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing

Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing
Author: Larry E. Swedroe
Publisher: Harriman House Limited
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0857199056

Sustainable investing is booming. The investment industry is fast approaching a point where one-third of global assets under management are invested with a sustainable objective. But do sustainable investment products do what investors expect them to do? How can an investor tell if their investments are having the social impact they want? Does that impact come at a financial cost? And how can investors weave their way through the web of confusing acronyms, conflicting agency ratings, and the mass of fund offerings, confident that they can recognize and avoid corporate greenwashing? Larry Swedroe and Sam Adams cut through the fog and bring clarity on all of this and more—providing investors with a firm plan for truly sustainable investing. The authors first define sustainable investing, illuminating the differences between ESG, SRI and impact investing, and reveal who is currently investing sustainably and why. They then move on to a comprehensive review of the academic research. What does the data really say about risk and return in sustainable investing? What performance can you genuinely expect from sustainable investments? And how are today’s sustainable investors using their influence to drive positive changes for society and the environment? Finally, this book arms you with a practical guide to investing sustainably, including how to effectively choose your asset allocation strategy, and select the managers and funds through which your money can create the change you want to see in the world. Your Essential Guide to Sustainable Investing is the definitive go-to resource that investors have been waiting for.

Three Essays on Asset Pricing in Regime and ESG Environments

Three Essays on Asset Pricing in Regime and ESG Environments
Author: Zongming Ma
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre:
ISBN:

Asset pricing has been a focal point among a broad range of financial studies. Traditional asset pricing models are encountering challenges by empirical data and sustainable compliance. For example, the Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) model exhibits the "volatility smile" puzzle and the role that sustainability plays in accounting for asset pricing remains controversial. Based on these observations, I raise three research questions. First, can an option valuation model with a pricing kernel that depends on market regimes address volatility smile and be consistent with observed market prices? Second, how do the Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) ratings affect asset prices across different economic sectors, firm sizes, and time horizons? Third, since the macroeconomic environment affects firms' strategies and financial performance, how do ESG ratings affect stock returns across market regimes? I address these questions in three essays. The first essay reveals that the proposed model can predict the market option prices more accurate than the alternative models (Black-Scholes-Merton, Heston-Nandi, Hardy) do for both the in-sample and out-of-sample data across regimes. The second essay finds that ESG ratings have a positive effect on stock returns, particularly for sensitive industries (gas, oil, chemical, mining, alcohol, and tobacco, etc.), for large capitalization firms, and for long-term investment horizons. The third essay uses a machine learning method to identify market regime using 134 macroeconomic factors and a factor model to discover a positive relationship between ESG and asset returns in the bear regime. The factor model also show that the impact of ESG rating on stock returns in a sector, given a market regime, depends significantly on the level of demand in that sector under that market regime.

Sustainable Investing

Sustainable Investing
Author: Herman Bril
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2020-09-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000097994

This book tells the story of how the convergence between corporate sustainability and sustainable investing is now becoming a major force driving systemic market changes. The idea and practice of corporate sustainability is no longer a niche movement. Investors are increasingly paying attention to sustainability factors in their analysis and decision-making, thus reinforcing market transformation. In this book, high-level practitioners and academic thought leaders, including contributions from John Ruggie, Fiona Reynolds, Johan Rockström, and Paul Polman, explain the forces behind these developments. The contributors highlight (a) that systemic market change is influenced by various contextual factors that impact how sustainable investing is perceived and practiced; (b) that the integration of ESG factors in investment decisions is impacting markets on a large scale and hence changes practices of major market players (e.g. pension funds); and (c) that technology and the increasing datafication of sustainability act as further accelerators of such change. The book goes beyond standard economic theory approaches to sustainable investing and emphasizes that capitalism founded on more real-world (complex) economics and cooperation can strengthen ESG integration. Aimed at both investment professionals and academics, this book gives the reader access to more practitioner-relevant information and it also discusses implementation issues. The reader will gain insights into how "mainstream" financial actors relate to sustainable investing.

Sustainable Investing

Sustainable Investing
Author: Cary Krosinsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2012-05-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136547401

Sustainable Investing is fast becoming the smart way of generating long-term returns. With conventional investors now scrambling to factor in issues such as climate change, this book captures a turning point in the evolution of global finance. Bringing together leading practitioners of Sustainable Investing from across the globe, this book charts how this agenda has evolved, what impact it has today, and what prospects are emerging for the years ahead. Sustainable Investing has already been outperforming the mainstream, and concerned investors need to know how best to position themselves for potentially radical market change.

The Short Guide to Sustainable Investing

The Short Guide to Sustainable Investing
Author: Cary Krosinsky
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 67
Release: 2017-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351275429

The vast majority of invested assets do not consider environmental, social or governance (ESG) factors. Socially responsible investing (SRI) emerged to address these challenges, but it remains largely deployed in "negative strategies" such as sector screening, and continues to be a small investment niche, largely due to perceptions about potential underperformance.Sustainable investing is a new, more positive investment construct, described as "an investment discipline that explicitly considers future social and environmental trends in financial decision making, in order to provide the best risk-adjusted and opportunity-directed returns for investors. By anticipating these trends ahead of the market, sustainable investing seeks to identify 'predictable surprises' that can help maximize value over the long term."This concise guide by one of the sector's leading experts: Disentangles the terminology around SRI and describes a new, positive, opportunities-oriented paradigm for sustainable investing Showcases funds and strategies that are delivering outperformance within ecological limitsSets out the key megatrends and scenarios which investors need to consider, and Offers a practical guide to constructing a sustainable portfolio. This is absolutely essential reading for investors, fund managers and analysts who need to get up to speed on sustainable investing.

Sustainable Investing

Sustainable Investing
Author: H. Kent Baker
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022
Genre: Impact investing
ISBN: 0197643817

"Can investors do well financially and do good for the world? Should they try? Many assume that investors "don't care who wins" as long as they are making money. For some investors, this mindset still rings true. Yet, many other investors challenge this stereotype and prefer to "make money mean more." Thus, they have dual goals: making money and doing good. This viewpoint, called sustainable investing, has gained considerable momentum in the last few decades. Sustainable investing delivers value by balancing traditional investing with environmental, social, and governance-related (ESG) insights to improve long-term outcomes. Some view sustainable investing as critical to the sustainability of investing. The book aims to demystify sustainable investing for "average" investors. It uses a question-and-answer format to examine whether such investments have a place in investor portfolios. Each chapter also contains insightful and amusing quotes by investment professionals and others. The book includes six chapters. Chapter 1 examines the changing investment landscape. Chapter 2 explores corporate social responsibility and the evolving responsibilities and obligations of a business. Chapter 3 focuses on the roles of social and religious values in shaping sustainable investing. Chapter 4 discusses the many investment options available to sustainable investors, such as stock, bonds, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds. Chapter 5 reviews the performance implications of sustainable investing. This research-oriented chapter investigates the intriguing question, "Can sustainable investors have their cake and eat it too?" Finally, Chapter 6 ends by focusing on building a portfolio with a purpose"--

Sustainable Finance and Impact Investing

Sustainable Finance and Impact Investing
Author: Alan S. Gutterman
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 163742003X

This book provides readers with a basic understanding of sustainable finance and impact investing including history, definitions of impact, current trends and drivers, future challenges, and an overview of the key players in the global impact ecosystem. The term impact investing first appeared in 2008. Today the most commonly used definition is investing made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. A wide range of individual and institutional investors that have already entered the impact investment marketplace and continued growing enthusiasm can be expected given that feedback from investors indicated that portfolio performance has generally met or exceed their expectations for both social and environmental impact and financial return. Established companies have been compelled to respond to calls by institutional investors to incorporate responsible environmental, social, and governance initiatives into their business models as a condition to continued support in public capital markets. Other companies seeking to demonstrate to impact investors their commitment to environmental and social responsibility have opted for emerging forms of legal entities, so-called social enterprises, which explicitly incorporate sustainability and multi-stakeholder interests into their governance and reporting frameworks. This book provides readers with a basic understanding of sustainable finance and impact investing including history, definitions of impact, current trends and drivers, future challenges, and an overview of the key players in the global impact ecosystem. The book also describes impact investment structures and instruments, social enterprises, and impact measurement and reporting.