Excerpt
May 28, 2021, Paper: "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 been efforts to understand the strategies and returns of impact investors (Gray et al. 2015; Kovner and Lerner 2015; Barber et al. 2021; Burton et al. 2021; Geczy et al. 2021), less attention has been given to systematically analyzing the companies that they fund. One important constraint has been data availability, as standard data sources do not typically identify impact portfolio companies (“IPCs”), or companies funded by impact investors. Even when identified, standard data sources contain only limited information on these companies, which are oftentimes privately held. "
Non-HKS Author Websites - Shawn Cole and Josh Lerner