NBS-PRI-ECGI Public Lecture Series - Value, Moral, and Impact: Sustainable Investing Goals, Actions, and Outcomes

The NBS-PRI-ECGI Public Lecture Series is a new global joint initiative between Nanyang Business School (NBS), the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) to facilitate the knowledge exchanges between academics, practitioners, and policymakers in sustainable business. 

The series provides monthly in-person or online public lectures. Each lecture will feature a leading academic to present cutting-edge research of a specific topic, and an industry expert to moderate the session, sharing insights from the field and also tailoring audience questions in a way to better enable bridging the gap between research and practice.

This lecture synthesises recent academic research on the heterogeneity of investor motivations in sustainable investing and their implications for capital allocation, fund manager behaviour, and sustainability outcomes. Drawing on investor surveys, incentivised experiments, textual analysis of fund disclosures, equity holdings, and portfolio company emissions, the evidence reveals that capital is often directed towards return-oriented or morally motivated strategies, rather than those designed to achieve real-world impact. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of ESG’s limited effectiveness in driving change and contextualise recent political critique—showing that many sustainable funds fall short of transformative goals not by failure, but by design.

Speaker:
Professor Ayako Yasuda
Maurice and Marcia Gallagher Professor of Finance
Graduate School of Management
University of California, Davis

Moderator:
Asha Mehta
Managing Partner & CIO Global Delta Capital