Date: Thursday 12 November 2026 Time: 6.30-7.35pm GMT
Venue: Sheikh Zayed Theatre, Cheng Kin Ku Building, LSE (map)
Speaker: Augustin Landier (HEC Paris)
Chair: Amil Dasgupta (FMG & LSE Finance)
Fourth lecture in the Sir Oliver Hart Lecture Series
Sustainable investing has several distinct ambitions: aligning portfolios with investors’ values, changing corporate behaviour, and delivering competitive financial returns. Yet these aims may pull in opposite directions. They require different strategies, and success on one dimension may imply giving up on another. Drawing on experimental evidence and economic theory, this talk asks what responsible investors actually seek, how financial institutions aggregate their preferences, and when divestment, engagement or conditional financing can alter corporate decisions. It examines how far private finance can generate genuine social and environmental impact – and where public policy remains indispensable.
Event hashtag: #LSESustainableInvesting
Biographies
Augustin Landier is Professor of Finance at HEC Paris. His research focuses on corporate finance, behavioral economics, sustainable finance, and banking. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has taught at the Toulouse School of Economics, New York University, and the University of Chicago, and has served as a resident scholar at the International Monetary Fund, a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard, and a member of the French Council of Economic Analysis (CAE). He is the co-author of Investing for Change: Profit from Responsible Investment (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Price of Our Values: The Economic Limits of Moral Life (University of Chicago Press, 2025), two books exploring the relationship between economics and moral values.
Amil Dasgupta has been Professor of Finance at LSE since 2016. He is Director of the Financial Markets Group and Academic Director of the Sustainable Finance Initiative within the Global School of Sustainability. He has a distinguished research track record in the areas of financial markets, institutional investors, and corporate governance and regularly publishes in top academic journals. He is a Research Member at the European Corporate Governance Institute, research advisor to the Reserve Bank of India, and academic visitor to the Bank of England.
The Sir Oliver Hart Lecture Series and the associated Conference Series were set up in 2023 to honour the distinguished British-American economist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Sir Oliver Hart. The themes of the lectures and conferences aim to have policy relevance and connections to Professor Sir Oliver Hart’s own pioneering research. The series currently focuses on the area of sustainable corporate governance, i.e., on studying the role of companies in the economy and society, whether companies should focus solely on profits or attempt to reflect the non-financial preferences of their shareholders, and how such preferences can be reflected in corporate governance.
The Sir Oliver Hart Lecture Series and the associated Conference Series are supported by the Global School of Sustainability at LSE (GSoS). GSoS is the interdisciplinary centre for sustainability research impact at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). GSoS works in partnerships to advance pioneering sustainability research, global policy engagement and worldleading educational opportunities. Grounded in LSE’s interdisciplinary excellence across the social sciences, GSoS’s global networks target the systemic challenges to sustainability embedded in the world’s economies, politics and societies.
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