Tax rates of responsible stock mutual fund holdings

Bridget Bearden

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2019, vol. 9, issue 3, 226-239

Abstract: Two limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR) discussion are addressed in this paper: first, the investment attributes of CSR have been prioritized over the tax implications; and second, empirical CSR analysis has focused on individual companies versus aggregated portfolios. Both limitations impact everyday investors, who bear the corporate tax burden as both ‘labor’ and ‘capital owners’, via aggregated portfolios. Further, empirical studies have shown mixed results on the relationship between CSR and corporate tax rate. This research adds to the CSR literature by intertwining tax effects of CSR with aggregated portfolios, by using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mutual funds as a proxy. Effective tax rates of underlying securities were analyzed for years 2015, 2016, and 2017 between ESG-themed and non-ESG-themed mutual funds. A significant relationship was found only for year 2015, in which ESG-themed large-capitalization mutual funds had a lower tax rate than non-ESG large-capitalization mutual funds.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20430795.2019.1600331 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jsustf:v:9:y:2019:i:3:p:226-239

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TSFI20

DOI: 10.1080/20430795.2019.1600331

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment is currently edited by Dr Matthew Haigh

More articles in Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().