I show that the performance of ESG investments is strongly driven by price-pressure arising from flows towards sustainable funds, causing high realized returns that do not reflect high expected returns. The coefficient linking ESG flows and realized returns is the product of two factors: The...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Based on signaling theory, we examine the role of external reviews during the life-cycle of corporate green bonds. We focus on (1) whether investment greenness is related to external review upon issuing a green bond and (2) whether disclosure quality is positively associated with the assurance...

This paper provides empirical evidence for a significant positive association between green finance and income inequality from a panel of 87 countries from 2004 to 2020. This relationship is strongest for countries with initially lower levels of income, low levels of financial development, and...

Empirical studies investigate various causes and effects of sustainable investments. While some attempts have been made to describe the results found by theoretical models, these are relatively complex and idiosyncratic. We relate to existing studies and use a parsimonious CAPM in which we model...

A first-order concern regarding sustainable finance is that it may crowd out individual support for more effective, policy-driven approaches to address societal challenges. We test the validity of this concern in a pre-registered experiment in the context of a real referendum on a climate law...