In recent years, impact investors - private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns - have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the non-financial characteristics...

Based on unique data from a representative computer-based survey among financial decision makers in Germany, this paper empirically examines the determinants of socially responsible investments (SRI). Our econometric analysis implies that the perceived financial performance of SRI matters for...

This paper proposes an information acquisition model to analyze active management when ESG matters. In equilibrium, more information is purchased when the asset sustainability profile departs from green neutrality, the fund ESG preference departs from the aggregate, or cross-fund heterogeneities...

What are the implications of disagreement about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings for portfolio choice? Constructing an optimal portfolio for each ESG rating agency by minimizing tracking error while satisfying a portfolio-level ESG constraint, we found that ESG rating...

Should long-term investors account for time-variation in model parameters? We develop a time-varying Vector Autoregressive model that can handle time-variation in intercepts, slopes, volatility and correlation, the leverage effect in volatility and fat tails. Long-term investors should take...

We propose a new framework for modeling and forecasting common financial risks based on (un)reliable realized covariance measures constructed from high-frequency intraday data. Our new approach explicitly incorporates the effect of measurement errors and time-varying attenuation biases into the...

The debate surrounding the financial performance of Shariah compliance (SC) and socially-responsible (SR) investments versus traditional ones remains controversial. This study pioneers an examination of this issue within Indonesia, a country where SC Investments (SCIs) and SR Investments (SRIs)...

The influence of past stock price movements on volatilities and correlations is essential for understanding diversification and contagion in financial markets. We develop a model that makes the influence of past returns on volatilities and correlations explicit. Employing information about...

News sentiment has been empirically observed to have impact on financial market returns. In this study, we investigate firm-specific news from the Thomson Reuters News Analytics data from 2003 to 2014 and propose an optimal trading strategy based on a sentiment shock score and a sentiment trend...

We provide new empirical evidence on the implications of public information arrival for investors' beliefs, using a daily measure of dispersion (uncertainty) of beliefs about firm underlying return distribution. Consistent with convergence in beliefs (less disagreement), the arrival of public...