UC Berkeley Press Release
Business school to host leading research prize in socially responsible investing
BERKELEY – UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, in partnership with the Social Investment Forum, announced today (Tuesday, Aug. 9) that the Moskowitz Prize - the only global award recognizing outstanding quantitative work on socially responsible investing - will come under the umbrella of the school's Center for Responsible Business.
The annual 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 socially responsible investing. The Social Investment Forum will continue to serve as a consultant in prize awards.
The prize will retain its name, but will become part of a larger research effort known as the Moskowitz Research Program within the Center for Responsible Business. The program will include publishing abstracts of key studies in the field via the www.sristudies.org online database and hosting the SRINotes blog, a discussion forum for leading thinkers in the field of SRI.
"Given UC Berkeley's quantitative excellence, the center is the perfect place for the Moskowitz Prize to thrive," said Kellie McElhaney, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business. "In addition to bringing deeper academic validity to social investing research, the partnership provides the opportunity to expose and involve business school students to this critical research and will put the Haas School at the forefront of socially responsible investing in the nation. It is a fantastic addition to our management offerings."
"The participation of the prestigious Haas School of Business in awarding the Moskowitz Prize is an exciting new chapter in the growth of social investing," said Social Investment Forum President Tim Smith. "This represents an important expansion of rigorous academic examination of the foundations and trends in the social investing industry. This is also a validation that SRI is an investment discipline whose time has come."
Lloyd Kurtz, founder and administrator of the Moskowitz Prize and senior portfolio manager with Nelson Capital Management, said social investing isn't an easy subject to study. "It involves management science, investment theory and economic analysis," he said, "and the Haas School is the perfect place to conduct this type of interdisciplinary work."
Competition is open to any author of an SRI study of a quality suitable for publication in an academic journal. The winner is awarded $2,500 and is selected by a panel of judges from academia and the investment industry.
In keeping with tradition, the winner of the prize will be announced each year at the SRI in the Rockies conference. This year's conference will be held Sept. 25-28, 2005 in Snowbird, Utah.
The prize is named for Milton Moskowitz, one of the first investigators to publish comparisons of the financial performance of screened and unscreened portfolios. His distinguished works include "The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America," an annual list published in Fortune magazine, and "The Global Marketplace: 102 of the Most Influential Companies Outside America."
More information about the Social Investment Forum is available at: http://www.socialinvest.org. For more information online about the Center for Responsible Business, see: http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/.