Florinda Silva

Socially Responsible Investing in the Global Market: The Performance of US and European Funds

This paper investigates the style and performance of US and European global socially responsible funds. Several specifications of the return generating process are applied as well as their corresponding conditional versions. Most European global socially responsible funds do not show significant performance differences in relation to both conventional benchmarks and socially responsible benchmarks. US funds and Austrian funds show evidence of underperformance. By applying conditional models, we find evidence of time-varying betas, but not of time-varying alphas. With respect to investment style, we have found evidence that socially responsible funds are strongly exposed to small cap and growth stocks. While these results are consistent with previous studies, they uncover some misclassification issues in these funds. Finally, we have also documented a significant home bias for global socially responsible funds.

Investing in Mutual Funds: Does it Pay to Be a Sinner or a Saint in Times of Crisis?

We investigate the performance of US socially responsible funds that employ different stock selection criteria: religious, social and ‘irresponsible’ criteria. Performance is evaluated over different market regimes using a Markov-switching conditional CAPM model that defines different states of the market endogenously. The ‘irresponsible’ fund outperforms in low volatility regimes, but underperforms in high volatility regimes. Furthermore, the risk of the ‘irresponsible’ fund is higher in low volatility regimes and lower in high volatility regimes. Socially responsible funds do not adjust risk according to market conditions. These findings suggest that socially responsible companies might provide better investments during periods of crisis.