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Impact Investing
In Latin America, Impact Finance Demonstrates Remarkable Progress and Untapped Potential
There is significant interest in impact investing in Latin America as a whole, but most of the financial activity occurs at the national level, providing an opportunity to develop diverse and country-spanning investments.
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Impact Investing
How Academia Can Do More to Advance Sustainable Finance
With looming global crises, scholars now more than ever must connect finance to its role in achieving social and environmental goals. Here are five ways they can step up their teaching and research.
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Impact Investing
Making a Better Business Case for ESG
Without clearer insight into the financial benefits of corporate sustainability efforts, they may never be scaled up in the face of climate change, COVID-19, inequality, and many other perceived or real challenges to a company's bottom line. Part of the Impact Investing Today and Tomorrow in-depth series.
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Impact Investing
How to Mainstream Impact Investing in Europe
Investors and policy makers who want to advance impact investing in Europe need to account for the field's different levels of maturity in national, subnational, and municipal markets. Part of the Impact Investing Today and Tomorrow in-depth series.
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Impact Investing
Roles Foundations Play in Shaping Impact Investing
A better understanding of the roles that foundations have played in the development of impact investing can shed light on the problems that arise when philanthropy turns to the private sector to help with achieving a greater good. Part of the Impact Investing Today and Tomorrow in-depth series.
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Impact Investing
How to Overcome ‘Warm Glow’ and Other Barriers to Effective Impact Investment Decisions
Impact investing, with its goal of delivering both financial value and social benefits, is particularly vulnerable to cognitive biases. Here are a few ways to overcome them. Part of the Impact Investing Today and Tomorrow in-depth series.
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Impact Investing
Q&A Roundtable: The Future of Impact Finance
Six leading members of the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium discuss trends, predictions, foibles, and tensions related to the rapidly growing field their group has been focused upon for the past four years. The first article in the Impact Investing Today and Tomorrow in-depth series.
Impact Investing Today and Tomorrow
In the past few years, the field of impact investing and sustainable finance and its many branches have grown in leaps and bounds. From 2017 to 2019, sustainable investments increased 34 percent around the globe, reaching $30.7 trillion last year. With such widespread adoption, the values-driven, solutions-seeking financial phenomenon has moved far beyond its starting position as a niche undertaking for do-good investors. Impact investing and sustainable finance are on the verge of becoming mainstream, if not so already.
At this juncture in the sector's evolution, it is more important than ever to understand what is driving growth and expansion in the present and where we may be headed in the future. In this series, members of the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium—a group of more than 190 professors who have been collaborating and driving advancements in research and instruction on impact finance for four years—will share their evidence-based insights into the field.
With perspectives from the United States, Latin America, South Korea, Europe, and elsewhere, instructors and researchers in the faculty consortium will explore many important aspects of impact finance, including behavioral economics, corporate reporting, impact quantification, and philanthropic involvement. They'll share data-driven analysis, lessons from history, predictions, and surprising observations. Their insights will help investors, financial firms, and other organizations concerned with societal and environmental ills make the most of opportunities before them so that their investments deliver the world-changing impacts they prioritize.