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Style and performance of international socially responsible funds in Europe

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Resumo:This paper analyses the performance and investment styles of internationally oriented Socially Responsible Investment (SRI)funds, domiciled in eight European markets, in comparison with characteristics-matched conventional funds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-country study, focused on inter-national SRI funds (investing in Global and in European equities), to combine the matched-pairs approach with the use of robust conditional multi-factor performance evaluation models, which allowfor both time-varying alphas and betas and also control for home biases and spurious regression biases. In general, the results show that differences in the performance of international SRI funds and their conventional peers are not statisti-cally significant. Regarding investment styles, SRI and conventional funds exhibit similar factor exposures in most cases. In addition,conventional benchmarks present a higher explaining power of SRI fund returns than SRI benchmarks. Our results also show significant differences in the investment styles of SRI funds according to whether they use “best-in-class” screening strategies or not. When compared to SRI funds that employ simple negative and/or positive screens, SRI “best-in-class” funds present significantly lower exposures to small caps and momentum strategies and significantly higher exposures to local stocks.
Autores principais:Leite, Paulo
Outros Autores:Cortez, Maria do Céu
Assunto:International funds Socially responsible funds Performance evaluation Investment style Matched-pairs approach
Ano:2014
País:Portugal
Tipo de documento:artigo
Tipo de acesso:acesso restrito
Instituição associada:Universidade do Minho
Idioma:inglês
Origem:RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
Descrição
Resumo:This paper analyses the performance and investment styles of internationally oriented Socially Responsible Investment (SRI)funds, domiciled in eight European markets, in comparison with characteristics-matched conventional funds. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-country study, focused on inter-national SRI funds (investing in Global and in European equities), to combine the matched-pairs approach with the use of robust conditional multi-factor performance evaluation models, which allowfor both time-varying alphas and betas and also control for home biases and spurious regression biases. In general, the results show that differences in the performance of international SRI funds and their conventional peers are not statisti-cally significant. Regarding investment styles, SRI and conventional funds exhibit similar factor exposures in most cases. In addition,conventional benchmarks present a higher explaining power of SRI fund returns than SRI benchmarks. Our results also show significant differences in the investment styles of SRI funds according to whether they use “best-in-class” screening strategies or not. When compared to SRI funds that employ simple negative and/or positive screens, SRI “best-in-class” funds present significantly lower exposures to small caps and momentum strategies and significantly higher exposures to local stocks.