Unpleasant arithmetic of socially responsible investment

Mohamed Arouri, Guillaume Pijourlet and Benjamin Williams

Economics Letters, 2020, vol. 193, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to model the impact of the presence of socially responsible investors on asset pricing. We predict that the presence of ethical investors leads to partially segmented markets, and thus market portfolio inefficiency. Indeed, if some investors do not want to hold some assets because of their ethical preferences, the other investors, which want to invest in all assets, need to take into account total risk instead of market risk, because a part of the idiosyncratic risk is no more diversifiable. We demonstrate that an unpleasant consequence of SRI is that since investors refuse to hold all assets because of ethical considerations, “unethical” firms must be priced lower than other firms, to compensate conventional investors for not being able to hold the market portfolio.

Keywords: Asset pricing; Socially responsible investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Unpleasant arithmetic of socially responsible investment (2020)
Working Paper: Unpleasant Arithmetic of Socially Responsible Investment (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:193:y:2020:i:c:s0165176520301889

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109281

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