Sustainable risk preferences on asset allocation: a higher order optimal portfolio study

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates the financial performance of asset allocation strategies under “sustainable” risk preferences and conventional risk preferences. We assume that traditional investors and ESG investors behave differently in their investment decisions. The optimal portfolio choice is developed including dynamic higher order conditional co-moments and time-varying risk aversion. From an out-of-sample empirical experiment, we observe that this optimization technique provides much more stable optimal weights for the sustainable portfolio than for the traditional one. Based on both classical and downside-risk performance measures, active management in both portfolios outperforms the global market index. In this context, the non-inclusion of skewness and kurtosis leads to an underestimation of actual risk exposure. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that the sustainable portfolio largely outperformances the traditional investment.