 Are impact and financial returns mutually exclusive? Evidence from publicly-listed impact investmentsOscar Bernal, Marek Hudon and François-Xavier Ledru The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 2021, vol. 81, issue C, 93-112 Abstract: Interest in impact investing is on the rise. And yet, there is a relative scarcity of academic literature on the financial performance and diversification potential of impact investments. In this paper, we apply a risk factors and dynamic correlation analysis to an original dataset essentially made of European publicly-listed impact firms. Our findings point to a risk-adjusted underperformance of impact investments compared to mainstream markets, and reveal impact firms’ failure to deliver non-negative returns to investors. This contradicts the practitioner literature, and suggests that investors must sacrifice financial returns for investing in line with their values. The results also indicate that the diversification potential of listed impact investments with regard to mainstream markets slowly decreases over time, suggesting that impact investors attach only limited weight to this aspect. Keywords: Impact investing; Public market; Financial performance; Portfolio diversification; Asset management; Non-financial utility (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:quaeco:v:81:y:2021:i:c:p:93-112 DOI: 10.1016/j.qref.2021.04.010 Access Statistics for this article The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance is currently edited by R. J. Arnould and J. E. Finnerty More articles in The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance from Elsevier |
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