Jena Santi

Jena Santi, a 2026 Graduate Summer Fellow at the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is a PhD student in Accounting at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Her research lies at the intersection of financial accounting, corporate disclosure, and institutional investor behavior, with a focus on how informational, incentive, and political frictions shape asset managers’ influence on corporate outcomes. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a researcher and served as an advisor to the Portuguese government, contributing to fiscal policy design and the evaluation of public policies.

During the IGS Summer Fellowship, Jena’s research will examine whether political pressure induces a divergence between asset managers’ visible ESG signals and their underlying portfolio holdings. Exploiting the enactment of Texas Senate Bill 13 as a quasi-natural experiment, she will investigate whether funds with exposure to Texas state pension systems reduce observable ESG engagement—such as support for shareholder proposals and ESG-related fund labeling—while maintaining ESG-aligned portfolios.

Her faculty advisor is Edward Riedl (John F. Smith Professor of Management, and Professor of Accounting, Questrom School of Business) and her project is titled “The ESG Engagement Gap: When Political Pressure Reshapes the Talk but Not the Walk,“