The 2008 financial crisis unveiled the intrinsic failures of the financial system as we know it. As a consequence, impact investing started to receive increasing attention, as evidenced by the high market growth rates. The goal of impact investment is to generate social and environmental impact alongside a financial return. In this paper we identify the main players in the sector and how they interact and communicate with each other. We use Twitter as a proxy of the impact investing market, and analyze relevant tweets posted over a period of ten months. We apply network, contents and sentiment analysis on the acquired dataset.Our study shows that Twitter users exhibit favourable leaning (predominantly neutral or positive) towards impact investing. Retweet communities are decentralised and include users from a variety of sectors. Despite some basic common vocabulary used by all retweet communities identified, the vocabulary and the topics discussed by each community vary largely. We note that an additional effort should be made in raising awareness about the sector, especially by policymakers and media outlets. The role of investors and the academia is also discussed, as well as the emergence of hybrid business models within the sector and its connections to the tech industry. This paper extends our previous study, one of the first analyses of Twitter activities in the impact investing market.
In the last decade, a global interest in impact investing-whose goal is to generate social and environmental benefits alongside economic returns-has rapidly grown. In this context, this paper explores the socio-demographic characteristics of investors who choose impact investment options over traditional investments, and on the drivers promoting such choices. More specifically, the study consists of an experiment-based research in which 602 participants (non-experts and experts in the financial sector) took part in a multiplechoice game involving different investment scenarios and incentive conditions. The findings show that both expert investors and female participants are more likely to choose impact investment options and that the tendency to invest in social funds increases with age. Neither external and centrally planned incentives, such as fiscal incentives, nor the educational level of participants show a significant influence on investment choices. By contrast, information about the actual social impact achieved by funds plays a role in promoting socially oriented decisions. In this regard, visual aids appear to be an effective means of promoting impact investment. These findings may be of interest to policymakers, social campaigners and investment practitioners themselves when designing strategies for raising interest in impact investing or norms to strengthen a conducive and enabling environment for social entrepreneurship more broadly.
Whilst impact investing has recently exhibited exceptionally high growth rates, creating an interconnected and functioning market remains an open challenge. Social media play an increasingly important role in understanding communication and relations between different players in the market. This is the first time that network, content, and sentiment analysis have been applied to impact investing, to the best of the authors' knowledge. In the paper, we explore the Twitter activities of 83,012 Twitter users in this field over a period of four months. We analyze Twitter sentiment w.r.t. related topics, identify influential Twitter users, and detect retweet communities. We characterize the communities in terms of influential users they comprise, hashtags they use, and how they relate to typical categories of actors in this domain (investors, social businesses,...). Despite policy makers' effort, we find out that more awareness has to be raised about the topic and the market is not so cohesive yet. The role of tech industry is also discussed. We provide recommendations for a more conducive environment to make the market flourish.
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