More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

New theories have emerged over the past 10 years that reveal CEFs to be an important and efficient organizational device. This review surveys the old and current literature on closed-end funds (CEFs) in general and theories of discounts in particular. Among the topics reviewed are liquidity...

Ibrahim & Ong (2008) use operational restrictions of Islamic Investment Guidelines and conduct a thought experiment on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) under restricted and non-restricted schemes. We use financial restriction and reach somewhat different results. Compliant REITs...

We show that following a tick size reduction in a decimal public limit order book (PLB) market quality and welfare fall for illiquid but increase for liquid stocks. If a Sub-Penny Venue (SPV) starts competing with a penny-quoting PLB, market quality deteriorates for illiquid, low priced stocks,...

In this paper, we shed light on the debate about the financial performance of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds by separately analyzing the contributions of before-fee performance and fees to SRI funds' performance and by investigating the role played by fund management...

We analyze the equilibrium size of the active management industry and the role of historical data---how investors use it to decide how much to invest in the industry, and how researchers use it to judge whether the industry's size is reasonable. As the industry's size increases, every manager's...

Using an international database containing 103 German, UK and US ethical mutual funds, we review and extend previous research on ethical mutual fund performance. By applying a multi-factor Carhart (1997) model we solve the benchmark problem most prior ethical studies suffered from. After...

In this paper, we investigate the performance-growth relation of French mutual funds. Using panel techniques, we find that capital inflows to French past top performing funds are not as strong as expected. This result suggests that there exist barriers to investment, that may come from the fact...

maintain an increasing trend despite of the dramatically consequences that the current financial crisis had on our weakened capital market.. Mutual funds’ managers have resorted to fundamental adjustments of portfolios’ structures considering the investors’ decreased risk tolerance. The...

Standard Fama-French and Carhart models produce economically and statistically significant nonzero alphas even for passive benchmark indices such as the S&P 500 and Russell 2000. We find that these alphas primarily arise from the disproportionate weight the Fama-French factors place on small...