Berkeleyan

Haas School awards Moskowitz Prize for socially responsible investment research

26 October 2005

The Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business, in cooperation with the Social Investment Forum, has awarded the 2005 Moskowitz Prize for Socially Responsible Investing to a Dutch research team that examined the relationship between a company's environmental and financial performance.

The Moskowitz Prize is the only global award recognizing outstanding quantitative work on socially responsible investing, according to Kellie McElhaney, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business, who served as a judge. This year's award is the first to be given since the prize came to be housed at the center. The prize was launched in 1996 by the Social Investment Forum, the national trade association for the socially and environmentally responsible investing (SRI) industry, to recognize the best quantitative study of SRI.

The $2,500-prize-winning paper, "The Economic Value of Corporate Eco-Efficiency," showed that a company's environmental practices matter for both financial results and valuation over a specific time period. Jeroen Derwall, Nadja Guenster, and Kees Koedijk, all of the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, and Rob Bauer of the Limburg Institute of Financial Economics at Maastricht University, co-authored the study. Bauer and Koedijk are the first two-time winners of the prize, having won in 2002 for a paper on "International Evidence on Ethical Mutual Fund Performance and Investment Style."

The award was founded in 1996 and named after Milton Moskowitz, longtime financial columnist and author of The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America, is given in cooperation with the Social Investment Forum.

For information on the Moskowitz Prize and the Center for Responsible Business, visit www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness.