New ways of investing

  • June 5, 2014
New ways of investing

Queen Nworisara-Quinn will receive the Academic Excellence Award from the Society for the Advancement for Socio-Economics for a paper on impact investing.

A Gates Cambridge Scholar will receive the Academic Excellence Award from the Society for the Advancement for Socio-Economics for a paper on impact investing.

Queen Nworisara-Quinn will present her paper entitled, The Emergence of Impact Investing: An In-Depth Study on the Construction of a New Market Category, at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago at the SASE conference in mid July. She will also receive a meritorious award of $500 for one of the best student papers.

Her paper examines the creation of impact investing, a new form of investing which aims to achieve both positive social or environmental impact along side financial returns. It charts the creation of impact investing and found that the pioneers of impact investing, which included foundations, family offices, high net worth individuals, investment banks, social entrepreneurs and development finance institutions were able to come together from across different organisational fields to shape broad perceptions about investment in new markets in India, Africa and Latin America.

Queen says: “These pioneers of impact investing were able to leverage cultural frames (i.e. “doing well while doing good”) in addition to exploiting the changing market environment after the financial crisis to mobilise capital toward investment opportunities they believed could generate both financial and social impact for society. In doing so, they began to profoundly change broad risk perceptions about investment in these new markets in an effort to address intractable social and environmental problems.”

Queen [2010] is doing a PhD in Management Studies. Her research focuses on the emergence of social impact investing in frontier African markets and how perceptions influence the flow of capital towards these markets. Her aim is for her research to improve access to capital for African firms and entrepreneurs.

 

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