Pension funds have come to play an increasingly important role within the new economy. According to Statistics Canada, in 2006, trusteed pension funds in Canada had $836 billion of assets and represented the savings of 4.6 million Canadian workers. Pensions at Work is a unique collection of papers that uses a labour perspective to deal with the socially responsible investment of pension funds. Featuring leading Canadian and international scholars, it builds on existing scholarship on socially responsible investment and on the growing interest of the Canadian labour movement in joint trusteeship. What is unique about this collection is that it synthesizes three distinct themes - socially responsible investment, pension funds, and labour studies. The contributors address an array of critical issues such as gaps in the education of union trustees of pension funds, the impact of human capital criteria on shareholder returns, the influence of corporate engagement upon corporate performance, and the nature of public-private partnerships (PPPs). Although the essays in Pensions at Work all address the nexus between socially responsible investment, pension funds, and unions, each looks at a particular manifestation of that relationship through a different disciplinary lens. This collection moves the discussion to pension funds in which union representatives are also trustees, a relatively new approach that will be of great interest to institutional investors, the labour movement, and instructors in labour studies programs.

From three of the founders of the field of socially responsible investing, and the authors of the pioneering volume Ethical Investing, here is a completely up-to-date guide that teaches you how to create an investment portfolio that makes money without making you sacrifice your principles. Peter D. Kinder, Steven D. Lydenberg, and Amy L. Domini have made careers of identifying investment opportunities that respect clients' social and political interests and have a strong track record that proves you can invest profitably and still respect your conscience. Now they explain their strategies in a book that allows individual investors to guide their own course or better communicate with their own investment counselor. Using their techniques, you can select, research, and screen companies according to a list of criteria that distinguishes publicly traded companies by the soundness of their policies in areas you care about - whether the companies are "green" or have defense contracts, what their employee practices are, if they test products on animals, where their overseas investments go, and much more. Investors will also be able to use these principles and strategies to control and direct their assets, whether they choose to invest in mutual funds, pension funds, or stocks and bonds. Pension fund managers and other institutional investors have discovered socially responsible investing. Investments in socially screened vehicles increased ten-fold to $500 billion in the last eight years. The authors' Domini 400 Social Index fueled some of this demand by offering investors the first broad-based index to track U.S. common stocks. Now, with this new book, everyone has the opportunity to use his or her money wisely and still be responsible to society's needs.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Since its green shoots first emerged around 50 years ago, acceptance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in institutional investing-especially at pension funds-has evolved with distinct shifts in investor preferences. This Pension Research Council volume traces these shifts and their implications, leading up to the present day. The book notes that investors have diverse reasons for devoting attention to ESG criteria when deciding where to invest their money. Some had religious motives, such as Quakers who focused on values; this approach can offer some risk mitigation. Nevertheless, studies that look at whether divestment actually changes companies' behaviors show that this rarely occurs. Accordingly, this book offers a variety of distinct viewpoints from a variety of countries, on whether, how, and when ESG criteria should, and should not, drive pension fund investments. The authors also find that policymakers should consider fund consolidation in private sector retirement systems, along with whether service-provider incentives could be better be aligned with sustainability incentives. For instance, boosting transparency in these markets would help generate better-informed policies, while providing beneficiaries with information relevant to their savings choices.

This book shows that pension funds and mutual funds that screen investments according to social and ethical preferences frequently harm those people and causes (for example, the poor and the environment) that they are designed to help.