Two competing hypotheses, value enhancing and value discounting, state that implementing socially responsible corporate policies can have positive or negative effects on firm value. This paper tests how a specific type of social responsibility–corporate equality–affects firm value. Corporate...

Using long-standing models for expected returns of US equities, we show that firm environmental ratings interact with those forecasted returns and produce excess returns both unconditionally and conditionally. Well-known factor models subsume neither environmental-related return differentials...

This paper analyses the effect of real estate news sentiment on the stock returns of Swedbank and SEB Bank, which are leading banks in Sweden and the Baltic region. For this purpose, we have selected sentiments from news about real estate in the markets of these banks in Sweden, Estonia, Latvia,...

In this article, I analyze the latest research on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors and corresponding corporate bond returns. Since the development of sustainable and ethical investing, there has been a vigorous and ongoing debate on whether ESG factors in corporate bond...

"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,...

We study how mutual funds respond to ESG scandals of portfolio companies. We find that, after experiencing an ESG scandal in their portfolio, active mutual fund managers (but not passive ones) are more likely to vote in favor of ESG proposals compared to other funds without scandal exposure...

Gil–Bazo and Ruiz–Verdú (2009) show that fund families strategically exploit the low performance sensitivity of investors, i.e., investors’ low elasticity of demand with respect to performance, to increase fund fees. Given that environmentally, socially and governance (ESG) focused...

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...

We set out in this study to examine: (i) whether ‘socially responsible investment' (SRI) portfolios can outperform less-SRI portfolios in the emerging Asian stock markets; and (ii) whether investors within these emerging markets achieve awareness of SRI through publicly available news. Based...