Using a new dataset of environmental, social, and corporate governance company ratings for the European market, this article examines whether socially responsible stock selection adds or destroys value in terms of portfolio performance. From 2004 to 2012, we find the following: Negative screens excluding unrated stocks from a representative European stock universe allow investors to significantly outperform a passive investment in a diversified European stock benchmark portfolio. Additional negative screens based on environmental and social scores neither add nor destroy portfolio (...) value, when cut-off rates are not too high. In contrast, governance screens can significantly increase portfolio performance under similar conditions. Thus, investors in the European stock market can do well while doing good. Because of a loss of diversification, positive screens can cause portfolios to underperform the benchmark. This implies that investors should concentrate on eliminating the worst firms. Our results are robust along several dimensions, namely, choice of performance measure, time, test parametrisation, portfolio weighting scheme, approximation of the risk-free rate, and consideration of transaction costs. (shrink)

In Japan, income, authority, and prestige are unequally distributed between men and women, even if they share the same occupational level. These inequalities are perceived as an ethical issue because they go against the principle of equal treatment at work. Nowadays, Japanese companies are under growing political and regulatory pressure to increase the hiring, promotion, and empowerment of female employees. In this context, the first equity index that tracks the financial performance of the best Japanese companies in terms of gender (...) diversity performance—the MSCI Japan Empowering Women Index —was launched in 2010. It aims to satisfy the growing demand of investors who want to reduce gender discrimination in Japanese workplaces. This paper compares the financial performance of the WIN stock index to the conventional parent index over the period 2010–2018, offering a unique setting to assess the effects of gender diversity screens on portfolio risk-adjusted performance. Our results are robust to a battery of risk-adjusted performance indicators and clearly indicate that investing in the WIN equity index does not come at a cost compared to investing in its conventional peer. This evidence is expected to reinforce confidence of investors who have an appetite for justice in increasing their investment in financial products that support the participation and the advancement of women in the Japanese workforce. (shrink)

With a meta-analysis of 85 studies and 190 experiments, the authors test the relationship between socially responsible investing and financial performance to determine whether including corporate social responsibility and ethical concerns in portfolio management is more profitable than conventional investment policies. The study also analyses the influence of researcher methodologies with respect to several dimensions of SRI on the effects identified. The results indicate that the consideration of corporate social responsibility in stock market portfolios is neither a weakness nor a (...) strength compared with conventional investments; the heterogeneous results in prior studies largely reflect the SRI dimensions under study. (shrink)

This study examines whether differences in financial performance exist for investment trusts which base their portfolio selection primarily on an ethical screen, compared to indexes which incorporate a broader spectrum of investments. Results indicate that on a risk-adjusted basis there is an insignificant difference in the financial performance of these trusts against three common market benchmarks. However as to the extent of the directional effect, there does exist slightly superior financial performance by ethical trusts against their respective industry average indexes, (...) but an underperformance against a smaller company's index and the market as a whole. The lack of a distinct advantage in the short to medium term for applying an ethical screen, may in part be due to the recent development of ethical investments in Australia. Stronger performances by older ethical investment trusts may indicate superior returns are more likely to occur over a longer term. (shrink)

Increased concern for the environment has increased the number of investment opportunities in mutual funds specialized in promoting responsible environmental attitudes. This article examines the performance and risk sensitivities of US green mutual funds vis-à-vis their conventional peers. We also analyze and compare this performance relative to other socially responsible investing (SRI) mutual funds. In order to implement this analysis, we apply a CAPM-based methodology and find that in the 1987–2009 period, environ- mental funds had lower performance than conventional funds (...) with similar characteristics. However, if we focus on a more recent period (2001–2009), green funds achieved adjusted returns not significantly different from the rest of SRI and conventional mutual funds. (shrink)

In this article, we studied the Corporate Sustainability Index (ISE) of the Brazilian Mercantile, Futures and Stock Exchange (BM&FBOVESPA), with the main objective of analyzing the performance of sustainable investments in the Brazilian stock market, during the period from December 2005 to December 2010. To achieve this aim, we characterized ISE portfolios and we compared its performance with the IBOVESPA (representing the market portfolio) and other BM&FBOVESPA sectoral indices. In the performance comparison, we used level of liquidity, return and risk (...) indicators, as well as the following measures: Sharpe, Treynor, Sortino, and Omega. Our results show that although sustainable investments have presented some interesting characteristics, such as increasing liquidity and low diversifiable risk, they did not achieve satisfactory financial performance in the analysis period. This indicates that the constraints imposed by this type of investment in capital allocation in Brazil may be harming their return and risk attractiveness. (shrink)

In contrast to the conventional fund management industry with a profit-oriented logic based on risk and return, ethical and faith-based funds should follow the religious principles of their investment-style philosophy. Islamic funds should obey the theological teachings of the primary sources of Islam, the Quran and Sunnah, as stakeholders expect these religious teachings to influence the investment decisions of fund managers. In practice, Islamic fund managers use Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions ’s screening criteria, based on secondary (...) sources of Islam, which allow investments that are only partially halal to be included in their portfolios. This study finds that a more religious logic in screening practices, although impairing diversification, does not necessarily harm performance. Thus, Islamic investment funds, and the wider ethical fund management industry, should, and could, adopt stricter screening criteria that match their investment mandates and bring more ethical business practices to the industry. (shrink)

The return rate is considered here as a fuzzy probabilistic set. Then the expected return is obtained as a fuzzy subset in the real line. This result is a theoretical foundation for new investment strategies. All considered strategies result of comparison profit fuzzy index and limit value. In this way we obtain an imprecise investment recommendation. Financial equilibrium criteria are a special case of comparison of the profit index and the limit value. The following criteria are generalized here: the Sharpe's (...) Ratio, the Jensen's Alpha and the Treynor's Ratio. Moreover, the safety-first criteria are generalized here for the fuzzy case. The Roy Criterion, the Kataoka Criterion and the Telser Criterion are also generalized. Obtained results show that proposed theory is useful for the investment applications. (shrink)

Sharpe’s ratio is the most widely used index for establishing an order of priority for the portfolios to which the investor has access, and the purpose of this investigation is to verify that Sharpe’s ratio allows decisions to be made in investment portfolios considering different financial market conditions. The research is carried out by autoregressive model of the financial series of returns using Sharpe’s ratio for evaluations looking over the priority of financial assets which the investor can access while observing (...) the effects that can cause autocorrelated series in evaluation measures for financial assets. The results presented in this study confirm the hypothesis proposed in which Sharpe’s ratio allows decisions to be made in the selection of investment portfolios under normal conditions thanks to the definition of a robustness function, whose empirical estimation shows an average 73% explanation of the variance in the degradation of the Spearman coefficient for each of the performance measures; however, given the presence of autocorrelation in the financial series of returns, this similarity is broken. (shrink)

This study investigates performance of portfolios composed of British socially responsible investments (SRI) stocks. Using the ‘Global-100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World’ list (known also as ‘Global-100’) to select the SRI companies, we found that, in the period 2000–2010, the returns of the SRI portfolios were on average higher compared with the corresponding returns of the market indexes. The annual average difference in returns of the SRI portfolios (with dividends) was 5.26 % and 5.69 % relative to the FTSE100 (...) and FTSE4GOOD indexes (the total return versions), respectively, but the differences in returns in the whole period, in individual years and in other sub-periods were in most cases not statistically significant. Positive performance of SRI stocks in the whole sample is, however, evidenced by risk-adjusted measures such as the modified Sharpe ratio (MSR) and certainty equivalent (CEQ) returns, as well as by incorporating various levels of transaction costs. Furthermore, a simple trading strategy relying on selection of SRI stocks from the Global-100 list would beat the market indexes in the whole period 2000–2010, even after inclusion of various levels of transaction costs. We also estimated the Fama–French and Carhart multi-factor models and found that the returns of the SRI portfolios cannot be consistently explained by conventional factors other than the market factor. (shrink)

There is currently much debate in the economic literature about whether ethical investment involves a financial sacrifice or premium. One of the most common methods of testing this compares the financial performance of ethical investment funds with that of other funds not considered “socially responsible” or ethical. The majority of these research studies evaluate the performance of the ethical funds according to classic measures, whereby different financial markets, in different countries and for different periods of time serve as reference for (...) evaluation. The ultimate conclusion of all of these studies is that there are no significant differences between the performance results of one type of funds and the other. In Spain, ethical investment funds are still an incipient sector of investment. To date, the Spanish market has not been included in any type of analysis of these characteristics. Therefore the main objective of this article is to compare the financial performance of ethical investment funds to that of other funds in the Spanish retail market. We propose the aggregate type of analysis as the Spanish ethical investment funds have experienced a weaker development in comparison to those of other developed countries. In the first step we suggest the financial performance to be compared by style analysis since the asset distribution of the Spanish Social Return Investment (SRI) funds differs from the European trend. In particular, we use the multifactor regression model with style benchmarks. We found that their financial performance is in all cases superior or similar to that achieved by the rest of the funds. In the second step, to achieve a more robust and homogeneous comparison, we used the bootstrap method, comparing ethical and non-ethical fund subsamples by homogeneous groups. No significant differences between these two types of funds have been found. Thus, if we assume the positive o neutral effect of ethical investment on investor utility in the retail Spanish market the financial and social performance (FSP) of ethical funds will be, in aggregate, superior to the FSP achieved by conventional funds. In conclusion, the financial performance of ethical mutual funds in Spain is no sacrifice. (shrink)

This paper empirically examines the financial performance of a UK unit trust that was initially “conventional” and later adopted socially responsible investment (SRI) principles (ethical investment principles). Comparison is made with three similar conventional funds whose investment objectives remained unchanged. Analysis techniques employed in previous studies find similar results: mean risk-adjusted performance is unchanged by the switch to SRI, with no evidence of over-or under-performance relative to the benchmark market index by any of the four funds. More interestingly, changes in (...) variability of returns over time are also modelled using generalised autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity models, not previously applied to SRI funds so far as is known. Results show a temporary increase in variability of returns, followed by a return to previous levels after around 4 years. Evidence shows the increased variability to be associated with the adoption of SRI rather than with a change in fund management. Possible explanations for the subsequent reduction in variability include the spread of corporate social responsibility activities by firms and learning by fund managers. In addition to reporting on a previously unobserved phenomenon, this paper raises questions for further research. (shrink)