2012 Moskowitz Prize: Call for papers

The 2011 winner of the Moskowitz Prize was a team of North American scholars which determined that firms with strong corporate social responsibility scores enjoy consistently lower costs of capital financing than firms with weaker CSR track records. In 2010, researchers Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann from Maastricht University (Netherlands) were awarded for their Research Paper “Corporate Environmental Management and Credit Risk”.

Member of the FSinsight Editorial Board Lloyd Kurtz, lecturer of social investing at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, is the program administrator for the Moskowitz Prize, which is awarded by the Center for Responsible Business every year since 1996. Lloyd is also the initiator of sristudies.org, a highly informative online annotated bibliography of studies of socially responsible investing which is now (also) being hosted by FSinsight.

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2012

Purpose

The annual Moskowitz Prize recognizes outstanding quantitative research in the field of social and sustainable investing. First presented in 1996 by the Social Investment Forum, the Prize has been administered by the Center for Responsible Business at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business since 2005. It 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”.

Prize

The $5,000 Prize competition is open to authors of studies relevant to social and sustainable investing. Studies from all business disciplines are welcomed, but should be of a quality suitable for publication in an academic journal. The prize-winning study is selected by a panel of judges from academia and the investment industry and will be accepted for publication in the Journal of Investing. Honorable mention or additional monetary prizes may be awarded at the judges’ discretion. The Moskowitz Prize is administered by an independent group of volunteers in cooperation with the Center for Responsible Business.

Eligibility

Anyone may enter. Studies may be published or unpublished, but unpublished studies should be of a quality appropriate for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal. Studies will be considered for the Prize only once.

Judging criteria

Entries are reviewed by a jury of scholars and investment professionals. Judging criteria include:

• Significance to practitioners of social and sustainable responsible investing.
• Appropriateness and rigor of quantitative methods.
• Novelty of results.

Announcement of the winner

The winning study will be announced at the Conference on Sustainable, Responsible, Impact Investing conference in the Mohegan Sun Conference Center in Montville, CT October 2-4, 2012.

How to enter

By e-mail: send electronic version (PDF or Word format) to Lloyd Kurtz at lkurtz@haas.berkeley.edu.

Questions

Contact Lloyd Kurtz, Prize Administrator, at: lkurtz@haas.berkeley.edu

Author(s)

Lloyd Kurtz
Lecturer of social investing, Haas School of Business