The Impact of Impact Investing

Jonathan Berk, Jules H. van Binsbergen

2022 | Academic | Impact Investing

The change in the cost of capital that results from a divestiture strategy can be closely approximated as a simple linear function of three parameters: (1) the fraction of socially conscious capital, (2) the fraction of targeted firms in the economy and (3) the return correlation between the targeted firms and the rest of the stock market. When calibrated to current data, we demonstrate that the impact on the cost of capital is too small to meaningfully affect real investment decisions.