Value, Moral, and Impact: Sustainable Investing Goals, Actions and Outcomes

In the eighth public lecture of this series, Professor Ayako Yasuda of University of California, Davis delivered her lecture titled, "Value, Moral, and Impact: Sustainable Investing Goals, Actions and Outcomes".

This lecture synthesises recent academic research on the heterogeneity of investor motivations in sustainable investing and their implications for capital allocation, fund manager behaviour, and sustainability outcomes. Drawing on investor surveys, incentivised experiments, textual analysis of fund disclosures, equity holdings, and portfolio company emissions, the evidence reveals that capital is often directed towards return-oriented or morally motivated strategies, rather than those designed to achieve real-world impact. The findings provide a nuanced understanding of ESG’s limited effectiveness in driving change and contextualise recent political critique—showing that many sustainable funds fall short of transformative goals not by failure, but by design.

The lecture will be moderated by Asha Mehta, Managing Partner and CIO, Global Delta Capital.

This in an online lecture that will be held on Zoom.

📆 Conference details: 
Lecture date and time: Thursday, 4 December 2025 | 14:00 – 15:30 CET (21:00 – 22:30 SGT)
 

📍Conference location: Zoom

The NBS-PRI-ECGI Public Lecture Series is a global joint initiative between Nanyang Business School (NBS), Principles of Responsible Investment (PRI) and European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) to facilitate the knowledge exchanges between academics, practitioners, and policymakers in sustainable business.  

The series provides monthly in-person or online public lectures. Each lecture will feature a leading academic to present cutting-edge research of a specific topic, and an industry expert to moderate the session, sharing insights from the field and also tailoring audience questions in a way to better enable bridging the gap between research and practice.