Etiska fonder - Ett hållbart alternativ?

: en kvantitativ studie om hur etiska fonder presterar i förhållande till konventionella fonder

Abstract

Since the last decade the supply of ethical funds has grown on the global fund-market. In Sweden both the supply and demand are growing of investing in companies with social- and ethical responsibilities. But in scientific research there are ambiguities between the performances of these ethical funds where some argues that ethical funds are inferior in terms of risk and return – meanwhile others arguing for the opposite. The purpose with this research is to examine how funds with ethical restrictions perform in terms of risk and return compared with the performances of conventional funds with no restrictions on the Swedish fund-market. The data, which the study is based on, will be analysed through the modern portfolio theory and other theories about restrictions, in particular theories from Markowitz research on diversification in portfolios. The data will further on be examined through three different risk-adjusted measurements, average risk and the funds daily return of five years. The result show that ethical funds generate less return compared to conventional funds. But the study can not prove a significant difference between risk and risk-adjusted return between the two fund-types. On the other hand, the study concludes that the restriction which follows ethical investments does not have a significant impact on the diversification to be able to say that ethical funds perform less than conventional funds in terms of risk and risk adjusted return. The assumption in this study has been that every restriction has the same impact. This approach can be further discovered in future research to examine which of the various restrictions that have the most impact on the performance of risk and return the most.