Does socially responsible investing result in lower financial performance?
According to a recent report from the Social Investment Forum, socially responsible investing (SRI) is thriving in the United States, growing at a faster pace than the broader universe of all investment assets under professional management. Roughly 11 percent of assets under professional management in the U.S. – nearly one out of every nine dollars – are now involved in SRI. SRI assets rose more than 324 percent from $639 billion in 1995 (the year of the first Report on Socially Responsible Investing Trends in the United States) to $2.71 trillion in 2007. During the same period, the broader universe of assets under professional management increased less than 260 percent from $7 trillion to $25.1 trillion. From 2005-2007 alone, SRI assets increased more than 18 percent while the broader universe of professionally managed assets increased less than 3 percent. SIF’s 2007 Trends report identifies $2.71 trillion in total assets under management using one or more of the three core socially r
