Sustainability Improvement or Impact Washing? Assessing Ethical Investment Policies of SRI Fund Providers from an Impact Perspective

Abstract

The concept of investor impact of socially responsible investments is relatively new. Our article expands knowledge in this field by analyzing how investor impact is implemented in the ethical investment policies of socially responsible fund providers. Based on a typological content analysis, we first develop an im-pact-focused category system, which in a second step is used to distinguish three types of fund providers: ESG hermits, ESG ambassadors and ESG evangelists. Our results suggest that socially responsible fund providers with a stronger impact orientation, such as ESG evangelists, also employ strategies that are more likely to achieve investor impact. In contrast, fund providers with a weaker impact orientation, such as ESG hermits, focus more on purity aspects and therefore tend to utilize strategies that defend the purity claim but also show a weaker investor impact

Keywords: investor impact; socially responsible investments; sustainable investing; SRI; shareholder engagement; sustainable development goals; typological content analysis

JEL Classification: M