The emerging global market of impact investment funds: a critical overview and a proposed empirical analysis

Abstract

The field of Impact Investing is currently experiencing an increasing amount of academics and practitioners’ contributions. Much has been explored in terms of the “whys” of impact investments in a reasoned attempt of “field-building”. It is not possible to say the same as far as the prevalent vehicles of Impact Investing, impact investment funds (managed by specialized firms), are concerned. The present work has in fact targeted this specific area of research which still shows huge gaps for interdisciplinary “innovative” entry points, even if it is at a very low stage of “literature-maturity” also with regards to the datasets of information available to allow the support of robust hypotheses driven paths. Nevertheless, it has been decided to take the challenge of building “manually” a dataset of descriptive elements for a globally spread sample of fifty funds in order for the author to be able to make the first steps towards the investigation and also to make it available for future interested scholars. Investigation which is namely focused on a permeating research question: what is the current level of public transparency and accountability observable along the two structural dimensions (the social impact strategies/measurement and the fund investment strategy) connoting impact investment funds and their management firms? The methodological principle chosen implied a “content analysis” of publicly available sources of information to enucleate evidences (and “mute” ones, too) and summarize the inferences made accordingly through a scoring approach of the different extents of thematic “voluntary” disclosure observable in this emerging market. In conclusion, it has been included a very basic attempt to test some relationship hypotheses between identified parameters of analysis without the claim to formulate exhaustive conclusions (seen the restricted size of the sample) but more with the optics to implicitly give hints for further topics of inquiry, potentially more focused on single or few actors but counting on the chance to be supported by wider primary data sources (interviews, direct contacts with impact investing networks, confidential data on financial performances, etc.).