The present paper proposes an overview of the existing literature covering several aspects related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors. Specifically, we consider studies describing and evaluating ESG methodologies and those studying the impact of ESG on credit risk, debt and...

This paper reexamines the relation between various downside risk measures and future equity returns in a global context that spans 26 developed markets. We find that there is no significantly positive relation between systematic downside risk and the cross-section of equity returns, and in fact,...

This paper investigates hedge funds' ability to time industry-specific returns and shows that funds' timing ability in the manufacturing industry improves their future performance, probability of survival, and ability to attract more capital. The results indicate that best industry-timing hedge...

This paper studies the impact of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings on investors' preferences and stock prices. We exploit a change in ESG rating methodology that non-linearly shifted ESG ratings for firms as a natural experiment. We show that the 'pseudo'-changes in the ESG...

This paper determines whether the world market risk, country-specific total risk, and country-specific idiosyncratic risk are priced in an international capital asset pricing model (ICAPM). The paper also tests if the price of risk associated with each factor is common across countries....

We investigate the relation between downside beta and stock returns in a global context using more than 170 million daily return observations. Contrary to the findings in the U.S. equity market, we show that downside beta does not explain the cross-sectional differences in future and...

We analyze the ESG rating criteria used by prominent agencies and show that there is a lack of a commonality in the definition of ESG (i) characteristics, (ii) attributes and (iii) standards in defining E, S and G components. We provide evidence that heterogeneity in rating criteria can lead...