The growing importance of SRI in the investment arena has resulted in considerable academic interest in the performance of socially responsible equity mutual funds. Remarkably, no attempts have been made to evaluate the performance of mutual funds that invest in socially responsible fixed-income...

We investigate persistence in the relative performance of 3549 bond mutual funds from 1990 to 2003. We show that bond funds that display strong (weak) performance over a past period continue to do so in future periods. The out-of-sample difference in risk-adjusted return between the top and...

Employees of liquidating firms are likely to lose income and non-pecuniary benefits of working for the firm, which makes bankruptcy costly for employees. This paper examines whether firms take these costs into account when deciding on the optimal amount of leverage. We find that firms with...

This paper investigates the relation between portfolio concentration and the performance of global equity funds. Concentrated funds with higher levels of tracking error display better performance than their more broadly diversified counterparts. We show that the observed relation between...

The segmentation of the socially responsible investing (SRI) movement with a values-versus-profit orientation solves the puzzling evidence that both socially responsible and controversial stocks produce superior returns. We derive that the segment of values-driven investors primarily uses...

A significant number of institutional investors publicly state the belief that corporate stakeholder relations are associated with firm value in a manner that the financial market fails to understand. We investigate whether stakeholder information predicted risk-adjusted returns due to errors in...

There exists a widespread consensus among mainstream academics and investors that socially responsible investing (SRI) leads to inferior, rather than superior, portfolio performance. Using Innovest’s well-established corporate ecoefficiency scores, we provide evidence to the contrary. We...

The disappointing performance of value and small cap strategies shows that style consistency may not provide the long-term benefits often assumed in the literature. In this study it is examined whether the short-term variation in the US size and value premium is predictable. Style-timing...