SRI Notes

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.

Journal of Investing Special Issue

The latest The Journal of Investing is a special issue dedicated entirely to socially responsible investing.  If you have an interest in SRI, this is closest you are going to get to a full academic treatise on the topic.

I had seen some of the articles before they went in, and they looked very strong.  I'm very happy to see an article on Islamic indexes, an area that has received hardly any attention.

A full table of contents is here.

Now With RSS Goodness

Socialfunds, the leading SRI news service, now has an RSS feed.  If you use an application like Bloglines to pull together your blog reading, you can now include the Socialfunds news feed.

I also want to put in a plug for Philosophy Talk, the radio program that questions "everything... except your intelligence."  Their blog is here.

Good Charitable Organization

I recommend you check out Direct Relief, based in Santa Barbara, California.  This charity, operating out of a single warehouse, provides free emergency medical supplies to health organizations around the world.

The American Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are also organizations that deserve your support.