Vice vs. Virtue Investing Around the World

Download or read book Vice vs. Virtue Investing Around the World written by Sebastian Lobe and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this paper, we empirically test the extent to which a portfolio of socially not responsible firms screened out of a market portfolio will trade at a discount. We create a set of global and domestic sin indexes consisting of a large number of publicly traded socially not responsible stocks around the world belonging to what we label as the Sextet of Sin: adult entertainment, alcohol, gambling, nuclear power, tobacco, and weapons. We compare their stock market performance directly with a set of virtue comparables consisting of the most important in-ternational socially responsible investment indexes. Employing a multi-factor performance measurement framework and recent boot-strap procedures for robust performance testing, we find no compelling evidence in the data that ethical and unethical screens lead to a sig-nificant difference in their financial performance.