Umeå School of Business - SIRP Program Director, Member of PRI Academic Network Committee
http://sirp.se

Sweden (Umeå)

Lars G Hassel is the Öhrling’s PricewaterhouseCoopers professor of accounting and auditing at Umeå School of Business in Sweden. He holds a Dr.Sc. degree in accounting from Åbo Akademi University in Finland where he also is a professor of accounting. Hassel has had visiting positions at Virginia Tech and Massey universities and at universities in Estonia, France, Malaysia and Russia. He is an honorary professor at Khabarovsk State Academy of Economics and Law in Russia.
Professor Hassel is since 2006 the Director of Sustainable Investments research program funded by Mistra, the foundation for strategic environmental research in Sweden. Mistra (www.mistra.org) funds and organizes interdisciplinary research aimed at solving strategic environmental problems. A Mistra program is considered a success when scientifically advanced research has been put to practical use in companies, authorities or other organizations. The overall purpose of the Sustainable Investments program is: “to find out how the use of sustainable investment practices can create an added value to investors, and identify barriers for such practices to become mainstream.” The main target group for the Sustainable Investments program is mainstream institutional investors. Research from this program can be found on the Sustainable Investment Research Platform webpage (www.sirp.se). The SIRP group was recognized with the Globe Award in May 2008 with the motivation for an outstanding and tangible research in the field of CSR.

His current research deals with the extra-financial value of ESG information in the value chain in the financial markets. The broad approach recognizes the fiduciary duty of institutional investors, SRI asset management, financial analysts’ use of ESG information and sustainability reporting by companies. He supervises doctoral candidates and post doc researchers, publishes research both in academic journals and books in cooperation with the business community. His writings also appear in newspapers and popular magazines. He has been involved in writing the Carbon Disclosure Project – Nordic report 2009 and serves in SRI reference groups for pension funds in Sweden. He is a frequent speaker at practitioner workshops related to ESG and SRI issues.