The effect of socially responsible investing on portfolio performance
Abstract
More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading strategy based on socially responsible ratings from the KLD Research & Analytics: Buy stocks with high socially responsible ratings and sell stocks with low socially responsible ratings. We find that this strategy leads to high abnormal returns of up to 8.7% per year. The maximum abnormal returns are reached when investors employ the best-in-class screening approach, use a combination of several socially responsible screens at the same time, and restrict themselves to stocks with extreme socially responsible ratings. The abnormal returns remain significant even after taking into account reasonable transaction costs. --Download Info
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Paper provided by University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR) in its series CFR Working Papers with number 06-10.Length:
Date of creation: 2007
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:zbw:cfrwps:0610
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Related research
Keywords: Socially Responsible Investing; Portfolio Management; Trading Strategy;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
- G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing
- G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General
- G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
- M14 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Business Administration - - - Corporate Culture; Social Responsibility
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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