Wayne Chang 🔸 comments on ESG investing needs thoughtful trade-offs

[Wayne Chang 🔸]

Thanks, Sanjay, I’m sharing a basic model I’ve written that highlights the trade-off for impact investments that seek both social impact and financial returns. This isn’t specifically about ESG but the key ideas still apply. The upshot: the investment must produce annually one percent of a same-sized grant’s social benefit for every one percent concession on its financial return. I construct impact investing’s version of the Security Market Line and quantitatively define what ‘impact alpha’ means.

This model was written a couple of years ago but since then, I actually haven’t applied it much. That’s because it’s hard to quantify impact, which is a key input that the model requires (and an input that any model will obviously require). There’s no established and easy way to monetize impact, especially given impact’s tremendous heterogeneity. Comparing the value of a year’s education versus a year’s health is hard enough. What about quantifying the counterfactual impact that a business has? Or that of the investor investing into the business? So modeling is helpful but at this stage, I think data is what we actually need most.