From ESG to Impact Investing: Catholic reflections from the field
Terrence Keeley1PointSix LLC
Luigi ZingalesUniversity of Chicago
Registration required. Open to students and faculty only. Email info@lumenchristi.org to inquire about registration.
from Sustainable: Moving Beyond ESG Toward Impact Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2022)
Should business and finance play larger roles in resolving the great social and environmental challenges of our time? Proponents of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing say yes. They argue that ESG financial strategies can help reverse runaway carbon emissions and fix income and gender inequalities, among other ills. ESG-integrated investments already encompass more than $120 trillion in financial assets. Are they working as promised? If not, how can they be improved?
In his new book Sustainable, Terrence Keeley, a finance-industry veteran offers an insider’s look at the promises, prospects, and perils of ESG investing. Keeley argues that many ESG advocates have been overly optimistic about what it can accomplish. Divestment threats are ineffective tools for altering corporate behavior, and verifiably “good” companies do not systematically generate great returns. Most importantly, business and finance cannot cure social ills on their own: regulators, public policies, civil society, and individuals must all play specific, complementary roles to shape the future we want. Keeley provides comprehensive solutions that would promote more inclusive, sustainable growth. In particular, he recommends reallocating capital from some indexed products toward an emerging class of strategies with more verifiable social and environmental benefits. Keeley identifies dozens of alternative “impact investing” strategies that could generate true double bottom lines. He also highlights promising civic organizations with proven methodologies for achieving widely shared benefits at scale.
Proposing practical, actionable, and in many cases profitable solutions to social and environmental problems, Sustainable offers an incisive vision of the roles business and finance can and should play in building a flourishing society.
Come and join the Lumen Christi Institute and Catholics at Booth for a lunchtime conversation between former Blackrock executive Terrence Keeley and Prof. Luigi Zingales.
Terrence Keeley is the Chairman and CIO of 1PointSix LLC. Previously, he was the Managing Director of Blackrock, Inc. In 2010, he was appointed to Pope Francis' Financial Reform Commission overseeing the Vatican Bank. He is the founding director of the Financial Hippocratic Oath movement and is an Advisory Board Member of the University of Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies at the Keough School of Global Affairs. He is the author of Sustainable: Moving Beyond ESG to Impact Investing.
Luigi Zingales is the Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and George R. Rinder Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow for the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a fellow for the European Governance Institute. He is the co-author of Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, author of A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the Lost Genius of American Prosperity, and a contributing editor of City Journal.
