Publications

I am very honoured and thankful that the VBA Journal invited me to contribute to its special 150th edition. In this article, I will share my personal perspective on the responsible investing phenomenon. I will first look back at the past two decades in which responsible investing transformed from a niche product to a hyped set of investment solution services. I will then highlight several implicit trade-offs and conflicts of interest that materialize in the many manifestations of responsible investing such as divestment, engagement, and ESG-integration strategies.

Out with the old

Fast-speaking Koijen talks about the financial markets with great passion. His main focus is why financial markets fluctuate as much as they do. “If on a given day the market rises or falls, you can usually come up with a few possible reasons. But no one really knows. Even when quarterly figures are published, we have a hard time explaining why share prices go up or down. That is one of the crucial questions that my collaborators and I are asking”, says the professor.

Dutch listed companies have, over the past decades, become increasingly engaged with the social and environmental footprints of their activities. This engagement has varied in intensity, with some companies leading international sustainability rankings while others are just getting started. Despite these efforts, it is clear that governments, investors, customers and society at large are demanding more corporate responsibility for global issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss and human rights abuses.

In today’s environment of volatile macro-economic policies and political swings, demand for investments yielding predictable and attractive stable returns is higher than ever. However, many low-risk instruments such as bonds continue to yield negative inflation-adjusted returns across Europe. Infrastructure may offer investors a balanced solution to manage these challenges. Infrastructure comprises physical assets which provide basic services required for a society to function, such as (toll) roads, electricity grids or power generation. These assets offer highly predictable revenues for multiple reasons; all income is contracted with reliable counterparties, sensitivity to economic cycles is limited as these assets tend to have monopolistic characters due to prohibitive costs of building competition and inflation protection is strong as infrastructure revenues are often linked directly or indirectly to inflation.