Does it Really Hurt to be Responsible?

Prior literature on socially responsible investment has contended that excluding “sin stocks” from a portfolio (negative screening) will reduce performance and increase risk. Further, incorporating stocks of firms with positive social responsibility scores (positive screening) will improve performan...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Humphrey, Jacquelyn E. (Author) ; Tan, David T. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Science + Business Media B. V 2014
In: Journal of business ethics
Year: 2014, Volume: 122, Issue: 3, Pages: 375-386
Further subjects:B Socially Responsible Investing
B Ethical Investing
B mutual funds
Online Access: Volltext (JSTOR)
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Description
Summary:Prior literature on socially responsible investment has contended that excluding “sin stocks” from a portfolio (negative screening) will reduce performance and increase risk. Further, incorporating stocks of firms with positive social responsibility scores (positive screening) will improve performance and reduce risk. We simulate portfolios designed to mimic typical equity mutual funds’ holdings and investigate these propositions. We remove the potentially confounding influences of differences in manager skill, transaction costs and fees, and conduct a clean experiment on the effect of positive and negative portfolio screening. We find no difference in the return or risk of screened and unscreened portfolios. We conclude that a typical socially responsible fund will neither gain nor lose from screening its portfolio.
ISSN:1573-0697
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s10551-013-1741-z