2005 Moskowitz Prize Winner

I had the pleasure last night of presenting the 2005 Moskowitz Prize to Nadja Guenster of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, who accepted on behalf of her three co-authors. (Official announcement is here.)

Nadja gave a great presentation on the study this morning at the SRI in the Rockies conference in Snowbird, Utah. Here is my abstract of the study, and the full text is available here.

If you are interested in the financial impact of environmental and sustainability practices, I think it is fair to say that this is a must-read. We have seen several studies showing environmental alpha in recent years, most recently Derwall(2005). But until now no one had really explained how or why this was happening. Nadja's piece is careful, thorough, and full of good judgments about methodology and data.

Congratulations also to Meir Statman, who received an Honorable Mention for his article on socially responsible indexes.  Meir is having a good year, as he also is headlining the just-released Journal of Investing special issue with a different piece on SRI.