Academic journey
Elena Vasquez came to research from practice, and it shows in the questions she asks. She spent eleven years in institutional asset management, latterly running a team responsible for integrating sustainability criteria into a large fixed-income portfolio, and left with the uncomfortable suspicion that the exercise was largely presentational.
She undertook a Doctor of Business Administration at LSE in order to test that suspicion properly. The DBA suited her: the degree is designed for research grounded in professional problems, and her data access was of a kind that few purely academic researchers could obtain.
Her thesis examined whether the introduction of mandatory sustainability disclosure in three jurisdictions produced measurable change in capital allocation. The finding — that disclosure regimes altered reported metrics substantially and allocation behaviour only marginally, with effects concentrated in a small number of firms facing direct financing constraints — was not what her former industry wished to hear.
She now directs a research centre that publishes an annual allocation-behaviour index, and sits on two standard-setting technical committees.
