Abstract
Assessing whether investments result in the desired non-financial performance is a key concern in the fast growing field of impact investments, including microfinance. The social performance of the institutions that offer financial inclusion services to underprivileged populations has come under increasing scrutiny, whereas the social performance of the investment vehicles that in turn finance these institutions is researched less. This paper makes use of several large data sets to develop an approach to measure the social performance of microfinance investment vehicles. Drawing on methods from empirical social science and the literature on non-financial ratings of firms, we develop formal quality criteria that the selection of individual social performance indicators and their aggregation into a single metric need to satisfy.
Meyer, Julia