Does socially responsible investing pay off? The investigation of 49 developed and emerging markets indicates that environmental, social, and governance ratings negatively predict future stock returns. A decile of global stocks with the highest ESG scores underperforms their low-rated...

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,...