The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database

M. Diane  Burton; Shawn  Cole; Abhishek  Dev; Christina  Jarymowycz; Leslie  Jeng; Josh   Lerner; Fanele  Mashwama; Yue (Cynthia)  Xu; T. Robert Zochowski

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database

by M. Diane Burton, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu and T. Robert Zochowski

Abstract

Impact investing has grown significantly over the past 15 years. From a niche investing segment with only $25 billion AUM in 2013 (WEF 2013), it experienced double-digit growth and developed into a market with an estimated $502 billion AUM (Mudaliapar and Dithrich 2019). Despite the growth and maturation of impact investing, gathering complete and accurate data on the characteristics of this industry continues to be a challenge. This paper describes the creation of a new dataset on both impact investors and the portfolio companies they fund, comprising 409 impact investors and 13,212 portfolio companies. We code impact investors according to established categories such as legal form, types of investments and return objectives. We then develop measures of the relative importance of social impact for each investor in an effort to add a new analytic categorization. We conclude by describing the distribution of investors and firms across these various categories.

Keywords: impact investing; Investment; Data and Data Sets; Analysis;

Language: English

Format: Print

78 pages

Citation:

Burton, M. Diane, Shawn Cole, Abhishek Dev, Christina Jarymowycz, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Fanele Mashwama, Yue (Cynthia) Xu, and T. Robert Zochowski. "The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-117, May 2020.

Organizations create significant positive and negative impacts through their employment practices. This paper builds on the substantial body of research regarding job quality and impact measurement to present a framework for monetized analysis of employment impact. We identify and propose a framework for measuring the four most salient dimensions of impact for employees, including wage quality, career advancement, opportunity, and health and wellbeing, as well as two principle impacts, diversity and employment location, for the broader labor community. The framework and methodology for calculating employment impact-weighted accounting figures is applied to several large corporations, resulting in positive impacts that range between 25 and 249% of their EBITDA suggesting significant heterogeneity in employment practices across organizations. These results demonstrate the feasibility of calculating employment impact in monetary terms, and provide a foundation for future application across additional geographies and contexts.

The treatment of foreign investors has been a contentious topic in U.S. entrepreneurship policy in recent years. This paper examines foreign corporate investments in Silicon Valley from a theoretical and empirical perspective. We model a setting where such funding may allow U.S. entrepreneurs to pursue technologies that they could not otherwise, but may also lead to spillovers to the overseas firm providing the financing and the nation where it is based. We show that despite the benefits from such inbound investments for U.S. firms, it may be optimal for the U.S. government to raise their costs to deter investments. Using as comprehensive as possible a sample of investments by non-U.S. corporate investors in U.S. start-ups between 1976 and 2015, we find evidence consistent with the presence of knowledge spillovers to foreign investors.

We develop a methodology that calculates the impact that organizations have on the environment through their water consumption relating to water stress risk. Using the methodology, we derive estimates for four companies that show how assumptions on the geographic location of the water withdrawal and use of different prices for water across geographies lead to variation in these estimates. We conclude with a framework guiding a user to understand the conditions under which a methodology might lead to over- or underestimation of water costs.

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The Project on Impact Investments' Impact Investment Database

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