How does KLD define socially responsible investing?
Kuh: The traditional definition of socially responsible investing is that it is the incorporation of social, ethical or religious criteria in the investment decision-making process. That’s the traditional off-the-shelf definition. And it’s a definition that, when the field was primarily retail, worked very well. But institutional investors don’t have the same kind of impulse toward alignment of ethics and investments that individual investors have. They are looking at these criteria as—to use a phrase I really don’t like—value drivers. They are looking at them in terms of indicators of risk. They are in a sense—and only in a sense—looking at these in a context that is not value-laden the way that an individual investor would tend to. So if one is designing an institutional product in the sustainability or SRI space, it’s going to look somewhat different from what one is going to design for an individual investor. What we’ve done is re-conceptualize these issues in the context of global
