Do ethical funds really perform poorly than conventional funds
Authors
Date
2016-06-26
Type
Conference Contribution - published
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Fields of Research
Abstract
The main aim of this research is to compare the overall performances and risks and return characteristics of ‘ethical’ investments against the performance of conventional investments in European and Asian countries; focusing on the examinations of the overall monthly performance of the Socially Responsible Investments (SRI) and/or Sharia Compliance Investments (SCI) indices in 5 European countries and 5 Asian countries within the period of 15 years (1998-2013). This study concludes that performance characteristics for both SRI and SCI funds
possess better performance than the conventional funds and this trend is observed in both European and Asian countries, in a manner that conform the proponents in the outperformance hypothesis. This
study also discovered that global financial distress has statistically significant, detrimental impact towards the performance characteristics of both SRI and SCI in both Asia and Europe, where both of these investment classes would have less satisfactory performance during recessions and experiencing improvements during the post-recession time periods.