Faculty & Research
Faculty & Research
35
Results
- June 2024 (Revised October 2024)
- Teaching Material
Politics Comes to ESG Investing
By: Shawn Cole and Jonah Zahnd
| While the past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the incorporation of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards into investor practices, this momentum has shifted recently in the United States, as some politicians argued that ESG investing practices... |
- 2024
- Working Paper
What Do Impact Investors Do Differently?
| In recent years, impact investors – private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns – have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the... |
- 16 Feb 2023
- HBS Case
ESG Activists Met the Moment at ExxonMobil, But Did They Succeed?
by Lane Lambert
| Engine No. 1, a small hedge fund on a mission to confront climate change, managed to do the impossible: Get dissident members on ExxonMobil's board. But lasting social impact has proved more elusive. Case studies by Mark Kramer, Shawn Cole, and Vikram Gandhi look at... |
- October 2021 (Revised May 2023)
- Case
Engine No.1: An Impact Investing Firm Engages with ExxonMobil
By: Mark Kramer, Shawn Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi and T. Robert Zochowski
| ExxonMobil, the world's fifth largest source of carbon emissions, remained committed to aggressively expanding its oil & gas business despite global warming. During the COVID pandemic this strategy resulted in massive losses as the price and demand for oil declined. In... |
- 2021
- Working Paper
Studying the U.S.-Based Portfolio Companies of U.S. Impact Investors
By: M. Diane Burton, Gurveen Chadha, Shawn A. Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Laura Kelley, Josh Lerner, Jaime R. Diaz Palacios, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski
| Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the reliance on market-based solutions to social and environmental problems around the world (Barman 2016; Horvath and Powell 2020). The growth of impact investing is a vivid example of this trend and, although there have... |
- April 2021 (Revised July 2021)
- Case
Public Equities Impact Investing at BlackRock
By: Shawn A. Cole, Vikram S. Gandhi, Michael Norris and John Masko
| In early 2021, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager with $9 trillion in assets under management (AUM)—sought to become a leader in promoting environmental and social sustainability. Over the previous ten years, CEO Larry Fink had written an annual open letter to... |
- March 2021
- Teaching Material
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (B)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
| In 2018, Thailand’s Bank of Ayudhya (known as Krungsri), was considering whether to participate in the first issue of a new financial instrument from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), known as a gender bond. Building on the success of the Green Bond program... |
- March 2021 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Making Impact Investing Markets: IFC (A)
By: Shawn A. Cole, John Masko and T. Robert Zochowski
| In 2017, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) faced the first big investment decision in its new Scaling Solar project. Founded in 1956, IFC was an international investment body with national governments as shareholders, whose mission was to promote economic... |
- 13 Nov 2020
- Working Paper Summaries
Long-Run Returns to Impact Investing in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies
by Shawn Cole, Martin Melecky, Florian Mölders, and Tristan Reed
| Examination of every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation, one of the largest and longest-operating impact investors, shows this portfolio has outperformed the S&P 500 by 15 percent. |
- 2024
- Working Paper
Long-run Returns to Impact Investing in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies
By: Shawn Cole, Martin Melecky, Florian Mölders and Tristan Reed
| We provide the first evidence on the long-run returns to private equity in emerging and frontier markets using the cash flows from every equity investment made by the International Finance Corporation across 130 countries over 58 years. Risk-adjusted returns are... |
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database
By: M. Diane Burton, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski
| Impact investing has grown significantly over the past 15 years. From a niche investing segment with only $25 billion AUM in 2013 (WEF 2013), it experienced double-digit growth and developed into a market with an estimated $502 billion AUM (Mudaliapar and Dithrich... |