We are a group of professors and research centers, currently at three major business schools – The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Business School, and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business – that have joined forces to dramatically increase the pace and scope of academic research on impact investing.

Led by Professors Katherine Klein (Wharton), Shawn Cole (Harvard), and Jessica Jeffers (Chicago), the consortium is building the world’s most comprehensive and rigorous database to fuel academic research on impact investing.  We call it the Impact Finance Database (IFD). 

By combining our efforts as individuals and the efforts of our respective centers – the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Initiative at the Wharton School, the Harvard Social Impact Collaboratory, and the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at Chicago Booth – we are making the process of impact investing research easier, faster, and more useful for researchers and fund managers alike.”

The practice of impact investing – investing to achieve both financial returns and a positive impact on society and the environment – has grown rapidly over the last decade.  But, to achieve the promise of impact investing, the field needs rigorous research.  Hope and advocacy are necessary but insufficient to build the field of impact investing.

Academic researchers are keen to study impact investing but have been stymied by the lack of comprehensive, objective, high-quality data on this topic. 

Together, Wharton, HBS, and Chicago Booth are building the IFD to allow academics to explore fundamental, but still unanswered, questions on the practice and performance of impact investing.    

With detailed and reliable data on the financial performance, legal governance, management characteristics, and impact strategies of impact investing funds across the globe, the IFD will fuel research on critical questions for impact investors, including the following:

• How competitive are impact investing financial returns?
• Are more sophisticated and in-depth impact screening and analysis associated with better or worse financial performance?
• Which impact targets and theses generate the strongest financial returns? 
• As firms gain experience in impact investing, how do their impact investing practices and investments evolve?
• How useful do fund managers find different types of impact assessment/reporting frameworks?

Fund documents give us insight into different facets of impact investing (financial performance, impact achievements, organizational structure). A core strength of the IFD is to bring together all of these pieces to build a holistic view of impact investing. Think of the parable of the blind men and the elephant: each piece in isolation provides a distorted view of impact investing; combining them gives us a much deeper understanding of how the space works as a whole. The depth and detail of the information in the IFD sets our research apart from all other research on the topic.

We have developed carefully standardized approaches to code the information we need from the documents, allowing us to build a quantitative data set that we can use for rigorous statistical analysis in combination with our survey data.

If you would like to learn more about why we collect documents and how we ensure their confidentiality, please see additional information here.

The database began with support from Anthos Asset Management, a large Dutch family office. The project has received additional funding from impact investing field-builders such as Omidyar Network, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the TowerBrook Foundation, and Blue Haven Initiative, as well as dedicated Wharton, Harvard, and Chicago Booth alumni committed to advancing research on impact investing. 

We will make certain data from the IFD available to qualified academic researchers after a period of exclusivity for approved researchers affiliated with the Impact Finance Research Consortium.  Researchers outside the consortium who are interested in obtaining IFD data will need to submit a formal proposal outlining research questions, methodological strategy, and publication objectives.  Additionally, all researchers will sign a confidentiality agreement ensuring that they keep all original data on Wharton’s secure, dedicated server and maintain the strict confidentiality of the data, abiding by our commitment to never release any information that could be used to identify any individual, firm, or fund that has contributed data to the IFD.

We would love to hear from you.  If you have any questions or are ready to help us build the IFD, please email us.