Social Impact Bonds: A Research Anthology

Abstract

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are pay-for-success arrangements that can be used to address a variety of public health issues, ranging from asthma to infant mortality. SIBs are used as financing mechanisms to raise upfront funding from private investors for social and public health preventative interventions. They function by leveraging the anticipated savings of prevention as a source for potential financial rewards for the intervention’s investors. In a SIB arrangement, rewards are due if and only if the intervention succeeds in reaching predetermined benchmarks, thereby shifting the financial burden of success to the investors. Since the world’s first SIB launched in 2010, SIBs have been discussed as a way to raise funds for public health initiatives.

The following articles and resources were collected through April 2014 using online databases and resources, including WestlawNext™ for legal publications. No material created before 2010 (the year the world’s first SIB started) was collected. The results were narrowed to those resources included here on the basis of their relevance to public health, law, and policy in states, tribes, localities, and territories. Articles were also selected to account for the different perspectives, roles, and responsibilities of parties involved in SIBs, existing and potential applications of SIBs, and issues raised by SIBs. Given that SIBs are new instruments that are still being studied and explored, this anthology should not be considered to be exhaustive.