We investigate whether positive or negative screening impacts the performance and risk of socially responsible mutual funds. We mimic the characteristics of mutual funds and bootstrap firm returns to form portfolios which reflect actual mutual fund holdings. We find positive screening results in...

This paper examines how equity mutual fund managers make decisions on investing in ESG stocks. Using investor flows to proxy for fund managers' pecuniary incentive, we show that mutual funds with flows highly sensitive to performance invest less in ESG stocks, while funds with flows positively...

What do asset managers believe regarding the financial performance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment strategies? We address this question by exploring the relationship between fund managers’ co-ownership and portfolio ESG performance. Managers with more “skin in the...

This paper questions the contribution that socially responsible (SR) screening makes to mutual fund performance. We propose a new decomposition of the variability of SR mutual fund returns making it possible to isolate the contribution of SR screening and compare it with the other traditional...

Evidence to date on the performance of Socially Responsible Investments (SRI) has almost exclusively been conducted within equity markets. We provide new evidence on the potential of SRI for other asset classes, by assessing the performance of SRI fixed-income funds. This is the first...

We study the impact of fund-families committing to the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment on mutual fund performance in China. First, we find consistent evidence that the funds coming from signatory fund-families outperform peers from comparable non-signatory fund-families, and...

"Sustainable investment"-includes a variety of asset classes selected while caring for the causes of environmental, social, and governance (ESG). It is an investment strategy that seeks to combine social and/ or environmental benefits with financial returns, thus linking investor’s social,...

Consistent with Chevalier and Ellison (1999), we find that mutual fund managers with degrees from elite universities tend to outperform their counterparts from less elite universities. The abnormal performance can be characterized as “fast performance,” the stocks they select realize excess...

We present evidence that equity momentum strategies are partially driven by positive-feedback trading intermediated via the mutual fund sector. We identify a U.S.-specific structural break to this channel that substantially weakened the relationship between fund flows and past style returns. As...

We show that mutual fund ratings generate correlated demand that creates systematic price fluctuations. Mutual fund investors chase fund performance via Morningstar ratings. Until June 2002, funds pursuing the same investment style had highly correlated ratings. Therefore, rating-chasing...