Dr Roor-Wubs’ research addresses a main challenge in sustainable finance: how to ensure that sustainable investing creates meaningful real-world impact rather than focusing solely on ESG metrics or reporting. The research clarifies that, to deliver meaningful change, investors need to actively manage the impacts of their portfolios rather than only measuring them.
In her PhD dissertation, Dr Roor-Wubs provides a framework for embedding transitions and impact into Strategic Asset Allocation. This framework can help institutional investors to contribute more effectively to long-term sustainable value creation. She also provides insights into three distinct sustainability mindsets that investment professionals employ when implementing sustainable investing: business case frame, paradoxical frame, and sustainability case frame. Gaining a clear understanding of these mindsets can strengthen collaboration and progress.
Impact measurement embedded in investment
At the heart of the dissertation, Dr Roor-Wubs acknowledges that investors finance the real economy, linking pension beneficiaries, companies, workers, communities and ecosystems through investment chains. Even so, much information about the social and environmental impacts gets lost along the way. In her dissertation, she argues that measuring and managing these impacts is essential for finance to contribute meaningfully to a more sustainable economy.
Her thesis consists of a systematic literature review, conceptual research, a case study of investment practice, and empirical asset-pricing analysis. Through these studies, she shows how impact considerations can be embedded throughout the entire investment process, rather than impact measurement as a tool. This demonstration offers observations on how institutional investors can better integrate impact into strategic asset allocation, stewardship and long-term decision-making.
Dr Roor-Wubs conducted her research under the supervision of Prof. Dirk Schoenmaker https://www.rsm.nl/ and Prof. Karen Maas https://www.eur.nl/en/ese The research contributes to the growing academic debate on sustainable and impact investing.
As sustainable investing continues to evolve, Dr Roor-Wubs’ dissertation A Handshake Away offers a timely framework for reconnecting finance with the people and environments it ultimately affects. To read her dissertation, please go to https://pure.eur.nl/en/persons/annebeth-roor/publications/.
