主题：What Do Impact Investors Do Differently?
主讲人：Shawn Cole，哈佛商学院教授
时间：10月29日（周三）上午10:00-11:30
地点：4-101教室
语言：英文
摘要：
Do impact investors create impact, or merely “impact wash”? Using a novel, comprehensive dataset, we provide the first systematic evidence on the social impact of impact investing. Impact investors focus on firms that generate positive impact, as proxied firms’ alignment with the priorities of the federal government, and by the demographic characteristics of places they invest. We find no evidence that impact investors improve worker satisfaction at their portfolio companies. While we find high levels of co-investment between impact and traditional investors, we also show impact investors are more likely than traditional investors to fund nascent industries, and invest counter-cyclically.
主讲人介绍：
Shawn Cole is the John G. McLean Professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches and conducts research on financial services, impact investing, and Social Enterprise. He serves as faculty chair of the Social Enterprise Initiative.
Much of his research focuses on how finance can create value for individuals, firms, and societies. A large body of work studies the design and distribution of financial services—such as credit, insurance, and savings—in emerging markets. He has also done extensive work on financial decision-making and financial education. More recently, he has studied the role of digital delivery of advice in a wide variety of contexts, including agricultural decision making.
A second focus is on sustainable and impact investing, where his work examines financial and social returns in both the United States and the world. He has worked in China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Vietnam. He is an affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, on the board of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and the faculty lead on Corporate Engagement. He is an affiliate of Harvard’s Center for International Development.
At HBS, he has taught FIN1 and FIN2 in the core curriculum, Business at the Base of the Pyramid, and Sustainable Investing, as well as a number of executive education courses and the Ph.D. development sequence in the Economics department.
Before joining the Harvard Business School, Professor Cole worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the economic research department. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, where he was an NSF and Javits Fellow, and an A.B. in Economics and German Literature from Cornell University.
His work on insurance earned the 2015 Shin Research Excellence Award; in 2015 he was also given a Faculty Pioneer Award from the Aspen Institute.
Outisde of Harvard, he co-founded Precision Development, a non-profit organization that has delivered agricultural advice to over 10 million farmers, and serves on the board of Our Kids Read, a US-based literacy non-profit. He has served on the Boston Federal Reserve's Community Development Research Advisory Council, served as an external advisor to the Gates Foundation, and was the chair of the endowment management committee of the Telluride Association, a non-profit educational organization.
