Launch of the Impact Investing Chair
In keeping with the excellence of its training programs, and in order to pursue the development of research at the highest level, the Foundation ENSAE-ENSAI is a vehicle for financing the Chairs, thanks to donations from companies and individuals.
With the launch of its very first chair, the “Impact Investing” Chair, headed up by research professors Peter TANKOV and Olivier David ZERBIB, the Foundation ENSAE-ENSAI hopes to contribute to a better understanding of how financial investments can support and accelerate the ecological transition.
Objective: to maximize the positive impact of listed investment strategies.
Mirova, an affiliate of Natixis Investment Managers dedicated to sustainable investing, launches the Mirova Research Center (MRC), a dedicated research center of excellence ambitions to strengthen methods and tools for sustainable finance. Mirova will establish partnerships with prestigious universities in Europe, the United States, and Asia in order to:
- Enhance its contribution to academic research on responsible finance, particularly by supporting innovative topics with a strong societal impact that are often overlooked by the academic community;
- Foster the emergence of new practices with a positive impact and facilitate exchanges between the academic world and the financial industry;
- Enable research project leaders to comfortably focus on their work through significant long-term financial support;
- Offer innovative investment solutions to investors that take into account the evolving role of finance in the context of accelerating transition-related challenges.
Research and innovation have been the cornerstones of Mirova's development since its creation over a decade ago. In a context of increasing data, deepening rules of non-financial accounting, and controversies, sustainable finance must strengthen its theoretical and methodological framework. We aim to make the Mirova Research Center a hub for intellectual emulation and rich exchanges to contribute to the advancement of research on responsible finance, foster the emergence of new practices, and leverage this work to offer our clients increasingly innovative investment solutions.
Mirova's support for the ENSAE Paris Chair in Impact Investing is one of the company's first two strategic partnerships. The initiative aims to contribute to theoretical and empirical knowledge beyond the study of strategy performance and risk pricing through a scientific program structured around two main axes:
- Impact investing, with an ambition of additionality, including shareholder engagement strategies and Net-Zero alignment of investors;
- Impact investing beyond climate issues: reconciling complementary environmental impact objectives and reconciling environmental and social impacts.
One of the major challenges of sustainable finance is to identify actionable levers that enable investors to efficiently support and accelerate the ecological transition. While academic literature on impact investing has already found evidence of the effectiveness of certain strategies, many essential questions remain open, specifically, regarding the additionality of investments, that is, the positive impact on the environment that would not have occurred in the absence of these investments, as well as the measurement of impact beyond climate issues. This research chair aims to contribute to this developing research field, both through a theoretical and empirical approach.
We are confident that the work conducted with the Impact Investing Chair at ENSAE will provide a robust theoretical framework and empirical analyses on which investors can rely to enhance their coordination capacity in the context of shareholder engagement for the transition. The second axis of the program should allow for a better understanding of the financial impact of biodiversity loss on portfolios and the reconciliation of ecological transition objectives with those of social justice.