"You'd have to be green to invest in this": Popular economic, financial journalism, and ethical investment

The paper examines “popular” models of financial markets constructed in contemporary financial journalism about ethical investment. Ethical investment is likely to be a fruitful area for the identification of popular models as they explicitly include moral criteria in addition to the more familiar concerns of risk and return. Unlike “economic” models, these popular models are characterised by the belief that individual actions have widespread economic consequences; that gains can be made by utilising appropriate insights; and finally, and more tentatively, that morality, including the belief that short-term sacrifice will bring long-term gains, provides privileged access to market predictability.