Sustainable Investing Provides Long-Term Value

03-10-2026

For Tim Coffin, free markets only work as intended when they are guided by a deep sense of stewardship and trust. A new Business Fellow at the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Coffin brings four decades in the bond markets, including municipal finance and sustainable investing, to help us see finance not as a game of extracting value, but as a civic-minded vocation that creates long-term value for communities, institutions and investors alike.

For 37 of his 40 years in the bond markets, Coffin helped finance public infrastructure through the $4 trillion U.S. municipal bond market, which funds roughly 75% of the nation’s essential public projects such as schools, transportation systems and water infrastructure. That experience convinced him that “good investing is creating long-term value” and that “bad investing is extracting value,” a distinction he sees as essential if free market capitalism is to retain its “license to operate” with the next generation. A self-described “huge believer in free markets,” he is equally clear that markets thrive only when investors recognize their responsibility to raise capital in ways that help businesses grow and communities flourish, not simply to maximize short-term returns at someone else’s expense.

For Coffin, trust is a core mechanism for both markets and the people in them. In a client-facing career that included senior roles at Corby Capital Markets, Fidelity Investments, and most recently Breckinridge Capital Advisors — an independent, employee-owned fixed income manager — he takes a long-term, holistic approach, rather than transactional, to peer, client, colleague and competitor relationships.

“One of my philosophies is that I always want everybody around me to want me to succeed. I want my family, co-workers, clients and competitors to want me to succeed. And you can’t expect that from other people unless you’re rooting for them also,” says Coffin.

Earning trust and building friendships and partnerships with clients and colleagues stands in opposition to extractive value creation. It also “creates better muscle tissue” for resilient businesses and healthier markets over time.

Coffin’s work in sustainable finance shows the synergy between trust, stewardship and rigorous analysis. His firm, Breckinridge, pursued the rigorous B Corp and Massachusetts Benefit Corporation designations, which became a management tool that allowed them to serve the interests of clients, employees, communities and markets by proving they serve a public benefit. It allowed the firm to add rigor to their investment approach by accounting for intangibles and externalities in their research — such as labor practices, environmental risk and governance — that don’t always show up neatly on financial statements but may materially affect future cash flows. It’s the kind of investing he recommends for those looking for long-term value.

As a Business Fellow, Coffin is eager to help Purdue students connect their finance education to its civic dimensions. He views a finance major as “a civics degree in a way,” arguing that understanding how capital flows — and the responsibilities that come with allocating it — is foundational for any career.