LONDON — Public health can be a money maker if investors use the right techniques to make their cash injections a safe bet, according to a report by Northeastern University academics.

The report, “Investor Action on Health: a review,” funded by the U.K. charity and think tank Health Foundation, offers major investors advice on how best to approach making a public health matter ripe for investment.

The report was a cross-campus collaboration, with Sabina Crowe, associate professor in economics on Northeastern’s London campus, and Boston-based researchers Kevin Chuah, assistant professor of international business and strategy, and Gary Young, professor in public health and health sciences, jointly securing the commission.

Chuah said the report is targeted at “all investors” but particularly institutional investors, such as pension funds and asset managers. “Whether they like it or not — and whether they realize it or not — they are exposed to health through their investments,” he said.

There has been a move over the past few decades for investors to take a “more holistic view” of the impact their investments are having, Chuah continued. “Of course investors are trying to increase their wealth, but they’re also trying to factor in risks and opportunities associated with broader societal impact, such as climate change and social inequalities,” he added.

To ensure investments are both money-making but also responsible, investors have used a number of mechanisms for influencing the practices of companies, Crowe pointed out.

These have taken the form of public engagement, shareholder resolutions, forming investor coalitions or lobbying executives privately. Investors have previously leveraged the influence of board members and policymakers to strengthen protection for workers’ physical and mental health.

The endgame of this activity, the researchers said, is to make these companies and sectors a better bet for investment by using their financial clout to influence behavior.

One of the first steps is to engage with the companies — potentially through the media or investor coalitions, for example — to put pressure on them to change direction. If that does not lead to change, the report shows that the next step could be to work with policymakers to force through improvements.

Chuah said: “Once they demonstrate a market failure, then either the market addresses it — and that’s where they can make money — or they can go to regulators and say, ‘This has continued to be market failure; the only way this can be addressed is through regulation.’”

Public engagement with companies has been known to have a major impact. Crowe and Chuah highlighted when JANA Partners, an U.S. investment firm with shares in Apple, wrote to the tech giant in 2018 asking the Silicon Valley company to include more parental controls in its products in order to prioritize digital well-being for children.

“Part of the reason for buying shares in Apple was to launch that campaign because they thought that that would help reduce the risk profile of Apple and potential liability in the future,” Chuah added.

The report for the Health Foundation, published Feb. 2, follows work carried out by Crowe and John Lowrey, assistant professor of supply chain, information management and health sciences at Northeastern, for Sharepoint, a charity focused on responsible investment.

Their “Financial Materiality Of Health” report, published in January 2025, indicated that health controversies were associated with destruction of shareholder value, while proactive engagement on health issues appeared to be linked to an uptick in valuation.

Crowe said those findings allowed her, Chuah and Young to work on the assumption that these health issues matter for the bottom line.

“One of the main assumptions that we made in the report is the fact that institutional investors care about health because it is financially material to them and not that they care about health just because of ethical reasons,” she explained.

In the 43-page report, the authors have provided examples and advice for investors to help them understand how far the dial would need to move on certain areas of public health for them to become desirable investments.

Picking 15 priority public health issues, they reviewed how much engagement they had received from the investment community to date.

The effects of smoking and drinking alcohol were all deemed to be mature issues that are well-known and have received government attention in the form of legislation.

“Progressing issues” included air pollution and access to medicine and vaccines, while “emerging issues” were found to be topics such as digital well-being and access to quality housing. 

The idea behind the report is that investors can then use that maturity chart to determine how they might act in a bid to turn these issues into money-making opportunities. The less mature an issue, the longer it could take for returns to materialize.

For investors, the report’s guidance offers the potential for a dual outcome: a return on investment combined with a positive change in society. As the report concludes: “Through persistence and careful design of their actions, investors can collectively play a meaningful part in contributing to improved societal health outcomes.”