Abstract
Details
Keywords
– The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze investor reactions to ethical screening by pension plan managers.
Design/methodology/approach
The author presents a sample consisting of data corresponding to 573 pension plans in relation to such aspects as financial performance, inception date, asset size, number of participants, custodial and management fees, and whether their managers adopt ethical screening or give part of their profits to social projects. On this data the author implements the fixed effects panel data model proposed by Vogelsang (2012).
Findings
The results obtained indicate that investors/consumers prefer traditional or solidarity pension plans to ethical pension plans. Furthermore, the findings show that ethical investors/consumers are more (less) sensitive to positive (negative) lagged returns than caring and traditional consumers, causing traditional consumers to contribute to pension plans that they already own.
Research limitations/implications
The author does not know what types of environmental, social and corporate governance criteria have been adopted by ethical pension plan managers and the weight given to each of these criteria for selecting the stock of the firms in their portfolios that could influence in the investors’ behaviour.
Practical implications
The results obtained in the current paper show that investors invest less money in ethical pension plans than in traditional and solidarity pension plans; this could be due to the lack of information for their part. To solve this, management companies could increase the transparency about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments to encourage investors to invest in ethical products so these lead to raising CSR standards in companies, and therefore, sustainable development.
Social implications
The Spanish socially responsible investment retail market is still at an early phase of development, and regulators should promote it in order to encourage firms to adopt business activities that take into account societal concerns.
Originality/value
This paper provides new evidence in a field little analysed. This paper contributes to the existing literature by focusing on examining the behaviour of pension funds investors whose investment time horizon is in the long-term while previous literature focus on analysing behaviour of mutual fund investors whose investment time horizon is in the short/medium term what could cause different investors’ behaviour.
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Umaira Danish Dervi, Ashraf Khan, Irum Saba, M. Kabir Hassan and Andrea Paltrinieri
Green finance has shown the importance of being socially responsible and supporting the flow of financial instruments to develop environmentally sustainable and ethical business…
Abstract
Purpose
Green finance has shown the importance of being socially responsible and supporting the flow of financial instruments to develop environmentally sustainable and ethical business models. The growing trends raised the need for a quantitative study to address scientific performance analysis and intellectual development. This paper aims to cater quantitative statistics, through a bibliometric review to understand the vital intellectual and influential constitution of green and socially responsible finance.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors apply trending and cutting-edge quali-quantitative approach of bibliometric citation analysis and review of 280 journal articles from the Web of Science database for the period of 1981–2021.
Findings
The results identify the leading academic authors, journals, institutions and countries with relation to green and socially responsible finance literature. We also discuss three research streams in this field: (1) overview of green finance, perception and investor behavior; (2) analysis of performance models and growth factors of green finance; (3) pricing mechanism of SRI. Finally, we identify the research gaps within existing green finance literature, proposing 30 research questions for the future agenda.
Research limitations/implications
The study confines on the Web of Science database, English published articles in known journals and reviews only. It relies on a reputable source and top scientific productions with the most direct link to green finance.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors knowledge, this paper is the first to discuss research streams in the literature of Green finance from a bibliometric aspect along with vast coverage of articles from reputed journals and databases till date. The results of this research along with future research questions will guide the researchers and academicians to further explore and stand on solid quantitative basis regarding the scientific development of Green finance.