TY - THES A1 - Rau, Katja T1 - Impact Investments - A Performance Analysis of Impact Funds N2 - Impact investing emerged as an investment option that can bridge the gap between funding from governments and philanthropist to combat social and environmental challenges (Bugg-Levine & Goldstein, 2009, p.41). However, many skeptical voices arise regarding impact investing, because some issues hinder the growth the impact investing market (Gray et al., 2015, p.3). Regulatory intervention is needed to overcome the persisting challenges (Martin, 2013, p.18). Therefore, a literature review was undertaken in order to give an overview of existing regulatory measures and initiatives that have been implemented in different regions to foster the growth of the impact investing market, especially in the light of the taxonomy that was recently proposed by the EU. The literature review revealed that many regulations and initiatives have been established across the world, however the regulatory environment regarding impact investing is currently fragmented. Therefore, it is important that governments collaborate to uniformize regulations on a global level. Furthermore, this paper aims to find out how impact funds perform financially in comparison to conventional funds. In order to answer that question a performance analysis, using the Sharpe Ratio as a performance indicator, was conducted. The performance analysis indicated that impact funds perform slightly better than conventional funds. The result goes in line with existing studies that have analyzed the performance of impact investments. This paper indicates that impact investments can compete with conventional investments, but that there is still a lot to be done to bring the market to scale. KW - Impact investing KW - Financial performance Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:1383-opus4-5326 ER -