Greetings, Agents of Impact!
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In this week’s Open:
- Confronting bias in asset management
- Climate risk in insurance
- Girls just want to have funds
- Immigration alpha
Let’s jump in. – Dennis Price
Must-reads on ImpactAlpha
- How fund managers drive impact alpha. New Frontiers in Value Creation features more than a dozen case studies of investors that have helped their portfolio companies scale their impact with market positioning, product development and access to capital, report Amy Cortese and David Bank.A guide to impact alpha.
- Confronting the real bias in asset management. Attempts to roll back initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion have opened the door to a more fulsome debate about the real racial biases in selecting managers to steer more than $82 trillion in investment assets in US capital markets. Read my story.
- Climate risk in insurance. As California’s insurance commissioner, Dave Jones was one of the first regulators to model climate risk scenarios for insurers. “The evidence is very clear,” Jones, now director of the Climate Risk Initiative at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, told Andrea Riquier. “We are marching toward an uninsurable future.” Read the Q&A.
- Girls just want to have funds! Investing in women, “is about unlocking untapped potential and driving technological advancement and profitable returns,” says Rhea See of She Loves Tech. Guest authors Sara Danzeo and Elena Mayer-Besting of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific share lessons from See and the rest of the managers in the 2XI Asia-Pacific GP Sprint for women-led and gender-smart fund managers. Dig into the cohort.
Agents of Impact
🏃🏾♀️ People on the move
- TPG named Scott Lebovitz, formerly with Goldman Sachs, as a partner and head of infrastructure for TPG Rise Climate.
- Janet Gumbs, previously with ABFE, joined Black Farmer Fund as finance director.
- BlueMark promoted Sarah Gelfand to president.
- Felipe Arango, former technical advisor to IFC, became chief operating officer of Fair Trade USA.
The Week’s Chart
👷🏾♀️ Support for workers is universal – and drives business outperformance
Worker issues, including wages, training and safety, consistently rank as the public’s top priorities for business behavior, according to Just Capital’s annual survey. Hewlett Packard Enterprises topped this year’s JUST 100 of companies ranked based on their performance across stakeholder issues. Propelling it to the top: Ensuring women and people of color earn the same as their peers, and apprenticeship programs for caregivers and formerly incarcerated individuals.
Short Signals: What We’re Reading
🗽 Immigration alpha. USeconomic output was greater and the deficit lower last year because more people were working, “mostly because of higher net immigration,” according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The immigration boost means GDP will be $7 trillion higher and tax revenues $1 trillion greater than they would have been otherwise. (CBO)
- Betting on migration. “Migration is not a problem in search of a solution; it is a solution waiting to be unlocked by thoughtful investment of resources and effort,” writes Jason Wendle of the Global Development Incubator. (SSIR)
🚀 Boosting sustainability allocations. More than 50% of individual investors plan to boost allocations to sustainable investments in the coming year, spurred by climate urgency and the performance of sustainable investments, a Morgan Stanley survey found. Three-quarters of investors are interested in strategies that achieve market-rate financial returns while also considering positive impact. (Morgan Stanley)
👋 When to exit, responsibly. In deciding when to exit an investment, British International Investment assesses whether its continued presence will make a contribution to the future impact of the business. The development bank may even exit before a predetermined impact has been achieved “if we thought that impact would be achieved without us.” (British International Investment)
🌳 Natural capital investing. More than 50 asset management firms are now running strategies that invest in forestry assets, farmland and “natural climate solutions” such as forest carbon capture. An estimated $384 billion to $845 billion in annual spending is required to safeguard the natural environment, compared to current annual spend of $154 billion. (Bfinance)
🏈 Sustainable Super Bowl. Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, the host of Sundays’ Super Bowl, was powered 100% by renewable energy. A Nevada desert solar farm owned by NV Energy and developed by EDF Renewables with 621,000 panels and battery storage supplied the power. (Business Insider)
Get in the Game
💼 Step up
- Featured job: Emerson Collective is hiring an investment associate in Washington, DC.
- Principle for Responsible Investment is hiring a head of product research and innovation in London
- New York State Insurance Fund is looking for an investment associate of ESG and sustainable investing in New York
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