This book presents the fundamental institutions of social finance. Microfinance, social impact bonds and venture philanthropy span a new marketplace that revolutionizes social economy and entrepreneurship, the market for capital, and the blend of the private and the public sector in the provision of public goods. Social finance also repositions financial economics as a discipline, transforming the traditional analytical argument of the risk-return tradeoff to the risk-return-social impact triangle, a triadic concept that is analytically irreducible to its components and must be analyzed in unison. Along with the social innovations that social finance brings about, this book also highlights social-economy aspects in well-known institutions such as crowdfunding, Islamic finance, cooperative banking, and socially responsible investments. This book also discusses the major challenges that social finance faces as an emerging marketplace: impact measurement, accounting standards and international regulation need to be quite solid to support effective communication between market participants across the globe and, at the same time, allow for flexible pursuit of social impact across diverse societal and environmental problems.

This book is addressed to educators, students, researchers, and social-economy professionals. As a textbook, this book is structured in terms of learning objectives, material for discussion, review questions, case studies, boxes, start-of-chapter terminology list and an appendix for readers who are not familiar with basic principles of financial economics. As a monograph useful to researchers, this book contains an extensive and reflective account of the relevant literature, highlighting the fundamental research questions and epistemological challenges that shape social finance as an emerging academic discipline. As reading material for professionals and policy makers, this book presents the structure, opportunities and limitations of social and financial innovations that redefine the content of public goods, economic development, and social policy.

Propobos, 2020, 272 p.