Research on socially responsible investment in equity markets initially focused on sin stocks. Since then, the availability of data has been extended substantially and now covers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. Using ESG scores of firms belonging to the MSCI World universe,...

We propose a novel way of measuring the equity portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of a 13F institution (the “sustainability footprint”) and examine the relation between sustainability footprints and risk-adjusted investment performance. The analysis shows that 13F...

Using a sample of S&P 500 firms between 2013 and 2017, we study the impact of ESG rating disagreement on stock returns. We conjecture that for disagreement about environmental ratings, a risk-based explanation induces a positive relationship between rating disagreement and stock returns. In...

We explore a novel survey on responsible investing by institutional investors around the world and match it to archival data on their equity portfolio holdings. We document that institutions that publicly commit to responsible investing exhibit better environmental, social, and governance (ESG)...

In a previous paper (Alessandrini and Jondeau, 2020), we demonstrate that in the last decade, investing according to screening based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria would have allowed investors to considerably improve the ESG quality of their portfolio without...

The effective functioning of the municipal bond market is crucial for the provision of public services, as it is the largest capital market for state and municipal issuers. Prior research has documented tax, credit, liquidity, and segmentation effects in municipal bonds. Recent regulatory...

Green bonds allow firms to commit to climate-friendly projects. Equity investors react positively to their announcement. Based on prior empirical studies, we suggest that green bond commitments help managers signal the profitability of their green projects and that they do so because they are...

This paper introduces the concept of sustainable finance literacy, which refers to retail investors' knowledge of regulations, norms, and standards for financial products with sustainable characteristics. We survey a large sample of Swiss households and measure different literacy concepts using...

This paper evaluates the impact of a screening process based on Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores for an otherwise passive portfolio of investment-grade corporate bonds. The main result is that this filtering leads to a substantial improvement of the targeted ESG score without...