ABSTRACT
In recent years, investors have shown significant interest in responsible investment products, including sustainable and ESG screened index funds. A natural concern for prospective investors in such funds is that a sustainable fund might underperform its classical unscreened counterpart. This paper argues that this underperformance risk can be analyzed by way of an option to exchange one asset for another, and we derive a simple formula that quantifies the fair annual insurance premium for covering this risk. Only a single parameter is needed to apply the formula. This parameter – a relative index volatility – is readily estimated from market data. Our empirical work utilizes data from BlackRock's ETF (iShares) universe to estimate the cost of insuring against underperformance risk of some common ESG screened funds. We find that the fair cost of underperformance insurance typically corresponds to sacrificing in advance between 0.5% and 3.0% of the annual return.
ABSTRACT
This study measures the degree of corporate risk disclosure and examines its impact on the credit risk of banks listed on the GCC financial markets during the period 2007–2021. The results of the content analysis show a low degree of overall risk disclosure index and sub-risk categories, except for financial risk disclosure, for all GCC-listed banks. The effect of the degree of risk disclosure on credit risk is examined by applying a robust generalized method of moment system estimation (GMM) to dynamic panel data. The results of the GMM show that the impact of disclosures of strategic risk, operational risk, financial risk, damage risk, and risk management vary from one country to another, but overall, they are positively associated with the financial stability of all GCC-listed banks. In terms of comparison, the results show overall significant differences in credit risk, strategic risk disclosure, operational risk disclosure, operational risk disclosure, firms’ damage risk disclosure, and risk management disclosure between conventional and Islamic banks as well across GCC countries.
ABSTRACT
We study the effect of investment horizon on the optimal stock–bond–cash portfolio in a dynamic model with uncertainty about climate change. The stock risk premium is assumed to be an affine function of the average global temperature and an unobserved factor which is estimated via Bayesian learning. We assume that the probability distribution of future temperature is uncertain. The optimal investment strategy, robust to the uncertainty about climate change, is derived in closed form and analyzed for returns on the S&P500 index and the S&P500 ESG index. We find that stock market investment is quite sensitive to climate uncertainty with allocation to the S&P500 index being the most sensitive. We also show that, even for relatively short time horizons, welfare losses from climate uncertainty could be large for investments in either the S&P500 index or the S&P500 ESG index.