Позитивные изменения. Том 2, №4 (2022). Positive changes. Volume 2, Issue 4 (2022)

Impact investment ventures are growing in the modern economy. However, the recent failures of some impact investment ventures are a cause for concern. Unfortunately, our concern about the ethicality of these kinds of social exchanges seem to emerge when it is too late. Namely, we become concerned about lack of ethics when a venture has failed or is collapsing. A better approach would be for us to have a means to proactively assess and improve the degree to which the arrangements and practices of a social exchange meet ethical standards. Whereas much work has been done to equip social ventures to evaluate their impacts, little work has been done to create frameworks that could be used to assess the degree to which social exchanges integrate ethical practices in their designs. This paper proposes such a framework. For illustration purposes, the proposed framework would also be used to evaluate the One Acre Farm, an impact investment venture in Africa.

https://clck.ru/32udAH

10. CLAIMING LEGITIMACY: IMPACT VS. ESG INVESTING

T. Cojoianu, A. Hoepner, Yanan Lin, F. Schneider

Research paper, 15 September 2022, SSRN Electronic Journal

Impact investment firms pursue both the achievement of positive impact and the delivery of financial returns. They are thus distinct from investment firms which only follow commercial objectives and consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors from the perspective of financial risks and opportunities. While ESG investing has become mainstream, impact investment and the underlying double materiality has yet to be institutionalised and legitimized. Using private market data from Preqin in combination with statements made by private market investment firms on their websites, we investigate how impact investment firms claim legitimacy compared to their ESG peers. Given that impact investment is still a nascent field it suffers from a heavier burden of proof and legitimacy has been recognised as a strategy to overcome the liability of newness. We find impact investment firms distinct themselves from philanthropy, which is more likely to be claimed to be undertaken by ESG investing firms, in addition to their core ESG risk management approach. Additionally, we find that impact investment firms are more likely to claim to be involved in partnerships, in particular with academia and corporations. We explain this as complimentary sources of legitimacy for both objectives in the dual goal of impact investment firms: Corporations can give legitimacy to the commercial angle while academia can aid legitimizing the measurement of positive impact. Relatedly, we find that impact investment firms lay more emphasis on expertise and being data driven on their websites than ESG firms. Lastly, we investigate whether impact investment firms seek legitimacy through claiming investment in certain fields and find significant results for investment themes such as Green Technology, Biodiversity, Education, Agriculture, and Water.

https://goo.su/ha2n

11. WHO HAS A SEAT AT THE TABLE IN IMPACT INVESTING? ADDRESSING INEQUALITY BY GIVING VOICE

Guillermo Casasnovas, J. Jones

Article, 11 June 2022, Journal of Business Ethics

Despite recognizing the importance of impact investing in combating complex societal challenges, researchers have yet to examine the capacity of the field to address systemic inequality. While impact investments are intended to benefit vulnerable stakeholders, the voices of those stakeholders are generally overlooked in the design and implementation of such investments. To resolve this oversight, we theorize how the fields' design – through its tools, organizations, and field-level bodies – influences its capacity to address inequality by focusing on the concept of giving voice, which we define as the inclusive participation of vulnerable stakeholders in decision-making processes. We build from stakeholder engagement research to show how the design of impact investing can address inequality using three illustrative cases: social impact bonds, impact investing funds, and national advisory boards. We conclude with a discussion of how the ethical decision of giving voice to vulnerable stakeholders will determine the capacity of the field to address inequality, as well as provide implications for future research and practice.

https://goo.su/AUUN

12. IMPACT RISK MANAGEMENT IN IMPACT INVESTING: HOW IMPACT INVESTING ORGANIZATIONS ADOPT CONTROL MECHANISMS TO MANAGE THEIR IMPACT RISK

Syrus M. Islam

Research paper, 20 October 2022,

Journal of Management Accounting Research

In impact investing, impact risk encompasses the probability that investment projects may fail to achieve the expected positive impact (i.e., positive impact risk) and/or may have a negative impact (i.e., negative impact risk). Using an inductive research approach, this study examines how impact investing organizations adopt control mechanisms to manage impact risk. It finds that impact investors adopt a wide range of input, behavior, and output control mechanisms to manage impact risk that may arise from investee-level, investor-level, and system-level operations. Also, to manage impact risk, investors establish control mechanisms to influence relevant actors not only within a firm's boundary but also outside its boundary. Given the inherent complexity and ambiguity in managing impact risk in impact investing, control mechanisms appear to rely heavily on judgment and experience and adhere more to the “satisficing” principle. Furthermore, investors tend to focus more on managing positive impact risk than negative impact risk.

https://goo.su/h2VBYMo

13. GIINSIGHT: SIZING THE IMPACT INVESTING MARKET 2022

Dean Hand, Ben Ringel and Alexander Danel

Report, October 12, 2022, Global Impact Investing Network

The GIIN estimates the size of the worldwide impact investing market to be USD 1.164 trillion, marking the first time that the organization's widely-cited estimate has topped the USD 1 trillion mark. The figure, which is the central finding of the GIIN's 2022: Sizing the Impact Investing Market report, reflects an increasingly comprehensive measurement of impact assets under management globally. The report, which was produced with the financial support of Nuveen, also spotlights two areas of development in the market that are becoming increasingly prevalent: green bonds and corporate impact investing.

https://goo.su/6mhtFa

14. DEFINING AND CONCEPTUALIZING IMPACT INVESTING: ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE OR CATALYST?

Kai Hockerts, Lisa K. Hehenberger, S. Schaltegger, V. Farber

Article, 26 July 2022, Journal of Business Ethics

This introduction to the special issue on impact investing applies the attractive nuisance notion to impact investing. Social sector actors ‘trespassing' on the playing field of conventional investment markets may not appreciate the risks. We apply the framework of essentially contested concepts to foster fruitful diverse research in this emerging research field. We advance six dimensions (intentionality, additionality, contribution, materiality, measurability and attribution), which we propose allow to describe different sub-clusters of how the term is used in research and practice. For each dimension we identify risks and opportunities stemming from the contested nature and highlight an ambitious research agenda for how future business ethics scholars can help address and foster impact investing. We conclude by illustrating how the papers in this special issue address these challenges.

https://goo.su/BFciym9

15. FINTECH FOR SOCIAL GOOD: A RESEARCH AGENDA FROM NLP PERSPECTIVE

Chung-Chi Chen, Hiroya Takamura, Hsin-Hsi Chen

Article, 13 November 2022, ArXiv

Making our research results positively impact on society and environment is one of the goals our community has been pursuing recently. Although financial technology (FinTech) is one of the popular application fields, we notice that there is no discussion on how NLP can help in FinTech for the social good. When mentioning FinTech for social good, people are talking about financial inclusion and green finance. However, the role of NLP in these directions only gets limited discussions. To fill this gap, this paper shares our idea of how we can use NLP in FinTech for social good. We hope readers can rethink the relationship between finance and NLP based on our sharing, and further join us in improving the financial literacy of individual investors and improving the supports for impact investment.

https://clck.ru/32udLy

16. DISSECTING THE “DO GOOD AND DO WELL” PHENOMENON: THE CASE OF THE UK'S MARKET FOR SOCIAL INVESTMENT

Jess Daggers

Article, 2022, The British journal of sociology

The developing discourse around social investment and impact investing makes strong claims regarding the possibility of both furthering one's own interests while simultaneously acting for the benefit of others – ”doing good and doing well.” Such claims are central to UK – and US-centric attempts to reform capitalism in the face of multiple global crises. This article uses Foucault's writing on (neo)liberal governmentality to analyze a particular manifestation of the logic of “doing good and doing well”: the attempt to build a market for social investment in the UK between 2010 and 2016, a project closely related to the development of the broader impact investment movement. Building on a close reading of Foucault's writing on the role of self-interest, it is argued that two incompatible versions of social investment are present within the development of the market: one (the “innovative version”) that assumes purpose and profit are fully compatible, and one (the “principled version”) that assumes it is important to maintain a boundary between them. The relevance of these findings and the approach used is discussed in relation to the social studies of market, and ongoing efforts to develop a critique of “doing good and doing well.”

https://goo.su/XEvcn

17. MECHANISMS OF IMPACT INVESTING – FROM A LITERATURE REVIEW TO A MULTISTAGE AND MULTILEVEL MODEL

Deike Schluetter, Lena Sch?tzlein, R?diger Hahn

Article, 1 August 2022, Academy of Management Proceedings

Impact investing (II) aims at achieving an intentional social impact next to a financial return, thus embracing a high level of hybridity and potentially conflicting goals of different actors. We find that a growing academic literature on II is currently scattered across a variety of disciplines, topics, and levels of analysis with inconsistencies in terminology and concepts and a lack of theoretical explanations and frameworks. Our systematic and integrative literature review of 99 articles clarifies conceptual ambiguities by developing a typology of II differentiating a weak and strong interpretation. We analyze research based on antecedents, management and outcomes of II to provide an overview of common research areas and point to inconsistencies in the overall scholarly contribution. We develop a mechanisms-based multistage and multilevel model of the II market to link diverse current theoretical contributions and elaborate future research avenues.

https://clck.ru/33Hfqp

18. THE IMPACT OF FRAMING ON IMPACT INVESTING

Fatima Harvey, Kerrin Myres, Gavin Price

Article, 28 June 2022, African Journal of Business and Economic Research

Impact investors are faced with the issue of risk and return evaluation on both the scale of financial performance and social performance. The study extends the understanding of the relationships between investor perception of risk, sense of understanding, and financial decision-making into the inherently dichotomous context of impact investment. Through the lens of prospect theory, an instrument for data collection was designed to evaluate the effects of finance outcome dominant, social outcome dominant, and hybrid outcome framing on an investor's perception of risk, sense of understanding, and capital allocation decisions. This research found that variability in outcome framing influences an investor's capital allocation decision but does not affect the perception of risk or sense of understanding. These findings contribute to the understanding of how the framing of compound outcomes with both financial and moral implications affects the decision-making choice process of individuals.

https://goo.su/7FD2zd

19. FROM FIDUCIARY DUTY TO IMPACT FIDELITY: MANAGERIAL COMPENSATION IN IMPACT INVESTING

Isaline Thirion, P. Reichert, V. Xhauflair, Jonathan De Jonck