From values to impact: what can sustainable investing achieve?
Speaker
Join us for the fourth lecture in the Sir Oliver Hart Lecture Series, in which Professor Augustin Landier will examine how far private finance can generate genuine social and environmental impact — and where public policy remains indispensable.
Sustainable investing has several distinct ambitions: aligning portfolios with investors’ values, changing corporate behaviour, and delivering competitive financial returns. Yet these aims may pull in opposite directions. They require different strategies, and success on one dimension may imply giving up on another. Drawing on experimental evidence and economic theory, this talk asks what responsible investors actually seek, how financial institutions aggregate their preferences, and when divestment, engagement or conditional financing can alter corporate decisions.
Meet our speaker and chair
Augustin Landier is Professor of Finance at HEC Paris. His research focuses on corporate finance, behavioral economics, sustainable finance, and banking. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has taught at the Toulouse School of Economics, New York University, and the University of Chicago, and has served as a resident scholar at the International Monetary Fund, a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard, and a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis (CAE). He is the co-author of Investing for Change: Profit from Responsible Investment (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Price of Our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life (University of Chicago Press, 2025), two books exploring the relationship between economics and moral values.
Amil Dasgupta has been Professor of Finance at LSE since 2016. He is Director of the Financial Markets Group and Academic Director of the Sustainable Finance Initiative within the Global School of Sustainability (GSoS). He is also the theme lead on Creating sustainable finance and business within GSoS. He has a distinguished research track record in the areas of financial markets, institutional investors, and corporate governance and regularly publishes in top academic journals. He is a Research Member at the European Corporate Governance Institute, research advisor to the Reserve Bank of India, and academic visitor to the Bank of England.
More about this event
The Financial Markets Group (@FMG_LSE) is a leading centre for research into financial markets. Research at the FMG examines how stable and efficient the financial system is, how it supports the real economy, and what policy measures can generate improvements in these dimensions.
The Sir Oliver Hart Lecture Series and the associated Conference Series were set up in 2023 to honour the distinguished British-American economist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Sir Oliver Hart. The themes of the lectures and conferences aim to have policy relevance and connections to Professor Sir Oliver Hart’s own pioneering research. The series currently focuses on the area of sustainable corporate governance, i.e., on studying the role of companies in the economy and society, whether companies should focus solely on profits or attempt to reflect the non-financial preferences of their shareholders, and how such preferences can be reflected in corporate governance.
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