Research
A Company’s Ability to Operate Responsibly Can be Supported or Inhibited by Capital Structures, Time Horizons, and Ticket Sizes It can be difficult for companies to have positive impacts and avoid unintended negative consequences (risks) if those companies aren’t backed by supportive investment structures. Consider WeWork and the classic venture capital (VC) model to “move […]
Read More… from Why Do We Need Regenerative Investment Structures?
Karen Kahn and Marjorie Kelly spoke with Delilah Rothenberg, co-founder and executive director of the Predistribution Initiative, about the ways in which the private equity model drives inequality. Delilah Rothenberg has been interested in Pete Stavros’ model for sharing equity with all workers for some time. A few years ago, when she first heard about it, […]
As the world emerges from the pandemic with high inflation, vast inequalities, and rising oil and gas prices, it seems timely to ask how much we can expect of investors and businesses in our current system. While individual investors — people and firms — are taking on climate change and other systemic risks like inequality […]
Key takeaways from the Predistribution Initiative’s July 21 roundtable on affordable housing The Predistribution Initiative (PDI) is focused on ESG implications of investment structures and practices. There is growing concern that as institutional investors migrate up the risk-return spectrum for yield and allocate more to residential real estate (RE), they are driving up valuations and […]
A recent article by Nathaniel Bullard on Bloomberg.com noted that heady valuations and investor fear of missing out, coupled with the need to fund planetary-scale innovation has provided a tailwind for climate tech. During the first half of 2021, about $16 billion of funding was invested across carbon, consumer, energy, food and water, industrial, and mobility sectors […]
Read More… from Climate Solutions Require Supportive Investment Structures
Should we worry that non-financial corporate debt is at a historic high (both in absolute terms and relative to GDP)? Though in theory financial vulnerabilities should be of concern, there are reasons to think that alarm bells may not be ringing quite yet. In a recent opinion brief, Robert Armstrong has recently looked at this issue, and come out not “terribly […]
Read More… from A Huge Amount of Corporate Debt Might Not Be Ok for Society and Investors
All eyes have been on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) following the agency’s recent invitation for public comments on how it should approach climate change and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures. Hundreds of investors, companies, sustainability advocates and civil society organizations voiced their support for the agency’s efforts to “[facilitate] the disclosure of […]
A new report translates the difficult questions we have on sustainability into suggested investment changes […] “Predistribution Initiative’s ESG 2.0: Measuring & Managing Investor Risks Beyond the Enterprise-level tackles these systemic issues head on, providing a detailed analysis of problematic investment trends in recent years. The paper highlights the inherent contradictions of more ‘traditional’ ESG […]
Read More… from Responsible Investor: The state of ESG 2.0: from incremental to systemic change
Do environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and impact investing practices in their current forms provide investors with sufficient tools to play a meaningful role in “Building Back Better” following the COVID-19 crisis? Many investors, including those who identify as “Universal Owners,” often seek to manage ESG risk and opportunity through corporate governance interventions. However, certain […]
Read More… from ESG 2.0: Measuring & Managing Investor Risks Beyond the Enterprise Level
ESG funds’ bias against workers is unintentional, but it is a feature rather than a bug […] A new paper by The Predistribution Initiative, ESG 2.0: Measuring & Managing Investor Risks Beyond the Enterprise-level, foregrounds potential negative impacts from capital structures themselves, not just portfolio companies. […]