Social investors have long been interested in executive compensation. The pay packages of CEOs occasionally attract attention from the mainstream press, too, and the June 12 issue of The Economist weighs in on the issue.

Three different articles consider executive pay, and they follow different paths to the same general conclusion. Yes, the authors agree, it’s possible that companies overpay their executives – especially in the U.S. – but it’s hard to say how much compensation is too much. The first article, “Pay Attention,” includes this sweeping statement:

“It is near impossible, of course, to determine the correct absolute level of executive pay.”

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The Sustainable Endowment Institute (SEI) recently released its College Sustainability Report Card. According to its Executive Summary, the Report Card “seeks to encourage sustainability as a priority in college operations and endowment investment practices by offering independent yearly assessments of progress.”

Institutions of higher education have played a significant role in SRI at least since the South African divestment movement of the 1980s. The Report Card examines both the investment practices of these schools and the sustainability of core university operations.

SEI finds that “the level of campus sustainability initiatives far outpaces that of endowment sustainability activity.” Responsible food-service and recycling practices, for example, earned “A” grades for 29% of schools. Only 4% of colleges achieved the same grade for their “Endowment Transparency.”

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If a tree falls in a forest when no one’s around, does it make a sound? If a company emits carbon dioxide but saves a forest, has it achieved climate neutrality?

While both companies and outside stakeholders agree that reducing and/or offsetting emissions is a worthy corporate objective, there is no consensus on how to define and achieve this goal.

A new study from Clean Air-Cool Planet and the UK’s Forum for the Future considers climate neutrality and makes detailed recommendations for how to achieve it. Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate Climate Neutrality defines carbon neutrality as a condition in which “a company, or one of its products or services, can have no net impact on climate.”

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A growing number of KLD’s clients serve high-net-worth investors (HNWI), commonly defined as individuals whose investable assets exceed $1 million. Nelle Coady, Assistant Manager of Client Services at KLD, reports that “the next generation of money” is concerned with the social impact of their investments.

“Young, high net worth investors are looking to be more proactive,” Nelle explains. “Our institutional clients tell us that social responsibility is a priority for more and more of their younger investors.”

The wider investment community, in the U.S. and abroad, has recognized this trend. American Banker reports: “Major custody banks are increasingly adding socially responsible investment factors into their monitoring services.”

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If your livelihood depended on the quality of your advice, wouldn’t you be your own best customer? Maybe not, especially if you’re a fund manager, according to a new study from Morningstar. Their analysis of SEC-required disclosure of managers’ holdings reveals some surprising numbers:

“In U.S.-stock funds, 47% report no manager ownership. And it gets worse from there. Fully 61% of foreign-stock funds have no ownership, 66% of taxable bond funds have no ownership, 71% of balanced funds put up goose eggs, and 80% of muni funds lack ownership.”

Should investors be concerned? Investment News quotes Morningstar’s Russel Kinnel:

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On May 16, the inaugural Green Business Summit, sponsored by the Boston Business Journal (BBJ), brought together executives, policy advocates, and investors to discuss how to build greener businesses. The BBJ should be applauded for encouraging companies to face the challenges presented by global warming and other environmental threats. As publisher Michael Olivieri has said:

We see green business practices growing as an increasingly important part of business life. It also represents an important growth industry in the area.

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One of the first socially responsible investment (SRI) screens excluded weapons suppliers from investors’ portfolios; today, however, publicly traded companies don’t just build weapons – they fight wars. Privatized Military Operations (PMO) have been integrated into American missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other less-visible theaters worldwide.

Researchers at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces have produced a fascinating in-depth review of PMO in modern warfare. The report, released in 2007, highlights the extent of PMO involvement in the Iraq war. For example, the ratio of private contract employees to American troops in Iraq is 1 to 1.5.

Private contractors now provide services that have traditionally been the responsibility of American soldiers. Some of these are support tasks, such as maintaining barracks and running kitchens. A more worrisome trend is PMO contractors’ performance of core combat functions: building overseas bases, maintaining weapons, and providing security details.

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PIMCO’s Bill Gross devotes his June Investment Outlook to “the debate about the authenticity of U.S. inflation.” Gross says that this debate “has been joined by the press and astute authors such as Kevin Phillips.” (Gross calls Phillips’ new book “Bad Money,” which was excerpted in a recent Harper’s article, “as good a summer read detailing the state of the economy and how we got here as an ‘informed’ American could make.”)

Gross describes a study that compares U.S. inflation with that of 24 other nations:

These representative countries, chosen and graphed by Ed Hyman and ISI, have averaged nearly 7% inflation for the past decade, while the U.S. has measured 2.6%. The most recent 12 months produces that same 7% number for the world but a closer 4% in the U.S.

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The Rev. Dr. Luther Tyson, a founder of Pax World Funds, has died at 85.

In any short list of SRI’s indispensible people, Dr. Tyson’s name would appear close to the top. He was one of the founders of the Pax World Fund, the first SRI mutual fund. Pax World was also the first management company devoted solely to SRI.

His vision of a fund for investors who did not want to own companies that profited from the Vietnam War helped establish the legitimacy of using ethical values to guide investment decisions.

His obituary from the Boston Globe appears below.

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