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All of jjharris's Comments + Replies

Effective Impact Investing
jjharris5y5
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"I have yet to see the case that investing through the stock market has anywhere near as much impact as donating to effective nonprofits." - where do you believe the post claimed otherwise?

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Effective Impact Investing
jjharris5y6
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The same logic also naturally applies to ESG funds. If a manager is known to outperform because of their superior use of ESG information then, on average, you can expect their fees to rise to reflect this and to neutralize the benefits to incoming investors to the fund.

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grissman
5y
I don't know if this is necessarily true, because often times outperforming firms get inflows of assets. Then they wouldn't have to raise their fees because they make more money by taking the same (or lower) fees off of a larger pool of assets. There may be research out there that completely disproves my hypothesis, it is just a hypothesis, but I don't think one can necessarily make that logical jump.
Effective Impact Investing
jjharris5y6
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Great to see this discussion happening! As a practitioner and researcher who has been thinking about these issues for a while I am still highly uncertain about what conclusions we should make about impact investing (II). So the more thoughtful discussion on this the better.

I have some general comments on this space & EA-bias and also some specific follow-up questions.

In the SRI/ESG/II space there is so much variety that a lot of the time people are talking past each other because they aren't talking about the same thing. So, one way for those who ... (read more)

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grissman
5y
You posed some fantastic questions, jjharris! By using your shares to support an advocacy campaign with an individual stock, I think you will marginally increase the success probability of the campaign. I can't say that you will generate abnormal returns. I did link to a couple studies that correlate successful advocacy campaigns with outperformance, but it's in no way guaranteed. Separately (or additionally), investing in a mutual fund/ETF run by an impact-focused investment manager gives it more assets, which gives it more operational capacity to pursue more social good, as well as a more powerful voice in all its advocacy campaigns. How does impact scale with a greater holding: James Gifford has the seminal work on this topic (https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/E28F5ODb5Rk2tu). Gifford finds some correlation between assets and effective engagement. But he makes the critical point that successful shareholder advocacy operates primarily on persuasion, not coercion. Having more assets does increase a shareholder advocate's credibility, but it's really about ability to convince management. Also, Gifford details how smaller investors have been able to raise issues to companies from the shareholder perspective, and build coalitions/generate press coverage to leverage their small stake and still drive impact. Your question of whether it's the best investment of your time is another good one, and very difficult to answer. There is not sufficient academic research comparing the effectiveness of advocacy from the shareholder angle to advocacy from traditional nonprofit angles. I think this would be a very worthwhile pursuit, and would love to see this happen. I will say that some nonprofits (animal welfare ones especially) have seen the value of the shareholder angle, and have partnered with investors, or used their own endowments as leverage in the past. The reason why I wanted to write this piece (my perspective, can't speak for Max) was to mak