Our previous article highlighted the busy schedule of our Belgian academic partnerships - Vlerick Business School and UCLouvain. Now, let’s focus on our French partner, Kedge Business School. See how the Kedge-Candriam Chair, “Finance Reconsidered”, is working full steam for sustainable economic development.
Multiple initiatives have kept our partnership with Kedge Business School busy.
First, the fifth edition of the Impact Investment Challenge, organised by the Finance Reconsidered Chair, took place in March-April. Students from of Kedge BS’s MSc Sustainable Finance and Corporate Finance programs created start-up projects with impact, evaluated by a jury of impact investing professionals and Kedge BS professors. This year’s winning projects - ShareMyMeal, Animacare and Algowheel –addressed student poverty, animal welfare in veterinary deserts, and the circular economy of marine waste, respectively. The happy winners received grants during a dedicated ceremony. Congratulations to them!
To discover the variety of projects presented over the past five years, visit the
Kedge-Candriam Chair website.
On the topic of “ESG and Asset Pricing”, Ricardo Henriquez, a research assistant within the Kedge-Candriam chair, is set to present his doctoral thesis by year-end, after four years of hard work. Co-determined with Candriam’s ESG research teams, the thesis explores the financial materiality of ESG criteria, with a focus on topics such as non-standard errors in ESG, ESG for long-horizon investors, the relevance of sustainability metrics, and the construction of climate risk proxies.
The Chair has also been working on the financialisation of ESG data, addressing standardisation, reliability, and transparency of information used by financial actors – a topic of importance in the context of enhanced scrutiny on greenwashing risks.
While ESG data are key to the integration of sustainable criteria into investment decisions, they could fall into the trap of reducing the complexity of sustainable issues to simple quantitative indicators, reviving the debate around impact issues (double materiality). This research, involving interviews of sustainable finance pioneers by researchers from Kedge BS, ICHEC Brussels and the University of Lille, will result in the proposal of two research articles and a collective book project on “the Future of ESG data” launching next fall.
The Chair is also conducting a study measuring the real contribution of SFDR funds to sustainability objectives, a topic once again chosen mutually with Candriam’s ESG teams in the context of the regulation package project highly-discussed at European level. Jolene Yeo, an MSc Sustainable Finance student and research assistant within the chair, will complete her master’s thesis on the subject, actively challenged by Candriam’s needs as an asset manager. Publication is expected next fall.
Kedge BS and Candriam teams’ on-going cooperation is also exemplified by the co-creation of a new course on “Sustainable Fund Strategies” for Kedge MSc Sustainable Finance students. A study trip, organized in April, was an opportunity for Kedge students to meet with Candriam Brussels team representatives and engage in discussions on various ESG investing themes.
We strongly believe in the power of collaboration between companies and universities as a catalyst for real-world impact. Combining our experts’ market insights with academia’s deep research capabilities is helping lay the foundation for a more sustainable financial future.
Source: Candriam