Impact Investing and Worker Outcomes

Josh Lerner, Markus Lithell and Gordon Phillips

No 33611, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Impact investors claim to distinguish themselves from traditional venture capital firms by pursuing social objectives. Whether they do so in practice is unclear. We use confidential microdata to assess worker outcomes across portfolio companies. Impact investors are more likely than other private equity firms to fund businesses in disadvantaged areas, with minority founders, and with more employee diversity. Post-funding, impact-backed firms more often hire minority, female, less-educated, and lower-earning workers. They also allocate salary increases more favorably to minorities and rank-and-file workers. Our results are consistent with impact investors and their portfolio companies acting according to non-pecuniary social goals rather than impact washing.

JEL-codes: G20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm
Note: PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33611.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33611

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33611
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().