Позитивные изменения. Том 3, № 4 (2023). Positive changes. Volume 3, Issue 4(2023) - Редакция журнала «Позитивные изменения»

https://clck.ru/37Ht6a

8. HOW IMPACT INVESTING FUNDS INVEST IN SOCIAL-PURPOSE ORGANIZATIONS: A CROSS-COUNTRY COMPARISON

Alice Borrello, Irene Bengo, Michael Moran

Paper, September 2023

Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management

Impact investing funds (IIFs) are a type of investment fund that aims to achieve both financial and social goals, and they have become a valuable resource for social purpose organizations (SPOs) seeking capital. Research evaluates the investment process by comparing approaches in two countries, Italy and Australia. Authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 9 IIFs and 12 SPOs and used the Gioia Methodology to conduct the data analysis. They found both similar features and divergences. The investing process by IIFs in Australia is conservative, more risk averse and more profit-oriented with a predominant “finance-first” strategy. By contrast, in Italy there is a clear preference for “impact-led” investment. Researchers argue this illustrates a fundamental difference in investment philosophy and that IIFs in the two countries navigate, interpret, and understand the field of impact investment in contrasting ways. Finally, study contributes to the growing literature on impact investing by putting forward an “ideal” impact investment process that respects the integrity and peculiarities of the Social Impact Investment approach.

https://clck.ru/37Hquw

9. HARNESSING THE WEB AND KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS FOR AUTOMATED IMPACT INVESTING SCORING

Q. Hu, D. Daza, L. Swinkels, K. Ūsaitė, R. Hoen, P. Groth

Paper, August 2023

Social Science Research Network

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were introduced by the United Nations in order to encourage policies and activities that help guarantee human prosperity and sustainability. SDG frameworks produced in the finance industry are designed to provide scores that indicate how well a company aligns with each of the 17 SDGs. This scoring enables a consistent assessment of investments that have the potential of building an inclusive and sustainable economy. As a result of the high quality and reliability required by such frameworks, the process of creating and maintaining them is time-consuming and requires extensive domain expertise. In this work, authors describe a data-driven system that seeks to automate the process of creating an SDG framework. First, they propose a novel method for collecting and filtering a dataset of texts from different web sources and a knowledge graph relevant to a set of companies. Then they implement and deploy classifiers trained with this data for predicting scores of alignment with SDGs for a given company. Results indicate that best performing model can accurately predict SDG scores with a micro average F1 score of 0.89, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solution. Researchers further describe how the integration of the models for its use by humans can be facilitated by providing explanations in the form of data relevant to a predicted score. They find that their proposed solution enables access to a large amount of information that analysts would normally not be able to process, resulting in an accurate prediction of SDG scores at a fraction of the cost.

https://clck.ru/37Hr2m

10. PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE OF IMPACT INVESTING AND CLOSELY RELATED FINANCIAL VEHICLES: A LITERATURE REVIEW

H. Chiappini, N. Marinelli, R. Nabeel-Ud-Din Jalal, G. Birindelli

Paper, August 2023

Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal

The purpose of this study is to analyze the intersection of research on impact investing and its closely related financial vehicles. The paper explores 196 articles collected from Scopus and Web of Science using bibliometric and content analysis methodologies. Despite a growing academic interest in impact investing, scholars generally investigate impact investing as a social phenomenon, using the specific financial mechanism of social impact bonds. This perspective potentially deflates the complex nature of impact investing, which actually combines both social and financial targets and uses a plurality of financial vehicles to reach its goals. The emerging themes identified will provide both academics and practitioners additional tools to further the debate on impact investing and the understanding of its potential and limits according to the different financial forms it takes. This review should pave the way for a discussion about the boundaries of the social impact sector itself. Despite the strong international commitment toward impact investing, tensions still exist. A comprehensive overview on the relevant aspects not yet thoroughly investigated will foster the growth of impact investments. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first holistic overview of impact investing, that jointly examines both literature on impact investing and literature on the correlated financial products used in the industry. The result is a comprehensive report of what is known about impact investing in its different financial forms, opening up new pathways for future studies.

https://clck.ru/37Hr8R

11. WELCOME TO MY HOUSE! FAMILY IMPACT INVESTORS’ SOCIAL IDENTITY AND APPROACHES TO IMPACT INVESTING

Jeanne Roche, C. Cruz, Braulio Pareja Cano

Paper, August 2023

Academy of Management Proceedings

Impact investors have become a subject of increasing academic interest for their unique capacity to channel financial capital to social impact projects. Identity theories have proved particularly useful in understanding the peculiar behaviors of this new breed of investors. Yet, we know little about how the social identity of impact investors, crucial to comprehend other-oriented behaviors, influences their approach to the field. One type of impact investors, who are also some of the leading players in the sector, is likely to shed light on this question: those born to business-owning families. Based on a grounded theory methodology, authors follow the case of eight family impact investors and find three types of investors with different levels of social identification to their family groups and different corresponding approaches to impact investing in terms of breadth of collaboration and degree of hybridity.

https://clck.ru/37HrLH

12. IMPACT INVESTING: SCIENTOMETRIC REVIEW AND RESEARCH AGENDA

Monica Singhania, Deepika Swami

Paper, September 2023

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility

Innovations in aligning investment