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This paper studies the herding behaviour among different exchanges trading bitcoin. The analysis allows us to conclude that the size of the exchange is an influencing parameter. Since 2018, when the significant growth in the number of exchanges became a reality, smaller exchanges have shown strong herding behaviour, whereas large exchanges seem to respond to their own information and beliefs and lead the process of price definition. This result may originate some temporary profitable strategies in the process of evolution towards efficiency according to the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis., This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [PID2019-104304GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/ 501100011033, RTI2018-093483-B-I00]; Government of Aragon [S11_20R: Cembe].

This paper studies the monthly expiration effect in the bitcoin markets. The emergence of trading in bitcoin futures in regulated markets is an ideal occasion to test this effect on an asset with singular characteristics. Our results with intraday data show that around the time of maturity there are significant changes in the trading volume, volatility and return of bitcoin, an asset that is traded in many exchanges simultaneously. Therefore, there is a clear expiration effect related to bitcoin futures. The closer to the expiration time (shortly beforehand or afterwards), the more intense these effects are. However, in spite of these general results, the expiration effect is not homogeneous across exchanges and depends on the characteristics of the futures contract in question. Robustness tests are also applied to confirm the results. The increasing participation of institutional investors is consistent with our findings, particularly in relation to the expiration effects of cash-settled futures, as these contracts are more appealing for sophisticated investors who could be interested in arbitrage or speculative processes., Grant PID2019-104304GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 ; Grant RTI2018-093483-B-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe; Grant S11_20R: Cembe funded by the Government of Aragon and ERDF.

This paper analyses the herding behaviour among exchanges around the expiration of bitcoin futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The database extends from December 2017 to October 2020, taking as a reference the main exchanges that trade bitcoin (Binance, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit, Kraken, and Gemini) and using hourly closing prices and trading volumes in bitcoin and US dollars. Adapting the proposal of Chang, Cheng and Khorana (2000) (CCK) to test conditional herding, we obtain results that indicate that the herding effect is significant during the week before expiration. After expiration, the herding effect lasts for a few hours and disappears. Information overload originating, among other causes, from sophisticated investors¿ strategies may generate this mimetic behaviour. The results show the relevance of intraday data applied to specific events such as expiration since the unconditional analysis shows, in general, anti-herding behaviour throughout the period of study., Grant PID2019-104304GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033
https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033. Grant RTI2018-093483-B-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033
https://doi.org/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe. Grant S11_20R: Cembe funded by the
Government of Aragon and ERDF.

This paper contributes to the literature about sustainability assessment and goes a step further by studying the effect on university performance. The aim is to analyze, from an external perspective, the relationships between the three dimensions of sustainability in universities (environmental, economic, and social), the similarities between universities, and the impact that it can have on performance. In order to carry out an empirical assessment for Spanish public universities, an index is proposed to measure sustainability through indicators for the three dimensions. The results show that there is a positive correlation among the three dimensions, but only the association between the environmental and the economic dimension is statistically significant, which evidences that there is not an integrated perspective of sustainability. Although there are no common patterns among universities, some similarities among them were found. Finally, the paper shows that the entities that integrate sustainability in their plans and activities have a positive impact on performance.

This study is the first to examine how both the domestic equity benchmark concentration and the Directive 2009/65/EC on risk of portfolio diversification may distort the accuracy of the original Active Share measure of Cremers and Petajisto (2009) in the Eurozone mutual fund industry. The main contribution of this paper is to provide statistical significance to the Active Share measure considering the spurious activity levels due to this benchmark concentration. The empirical application to a comprehensive sample of domestic equity funds provides evidence of significant differences in the actual levels of active management in the Eurozone mutual fund industries.

This work is the first neural approach to Piotroski’s (2000) F-Score. From the same informative signals, our approach based on network data envelopment analysis allows for 1) overcoming the binary perspective of classification between companies with good/bad fundamentals, and 2) appropriately assessing the existing interaction among a company’s main financial areas. The analysis of a complete sample of the largest listed companies in the Eurozone and in the U.S. market in the period 2006-2017 shows that our neural F-Score significantly improves the portfolio returns obtained by the original F-Score.

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Universities have a critical role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), both for implementing active policies and for encouraging other actors to participate. This requires having the skills and mind-sets to contribute to these challenges. The relevance and the commitment of universities to sustainability has led to the inclusion of SDGs in the strategies and agendas of these institutions. This requires the involvement of all the actors and some structural and cultural changes that put SDGs at the core of the governance and management of the university, embracing all the stakeholders. Various internal and external factors may influence the impact and success of the policies and activities aiming at achieving the SDGs, both from an overall perspective and for individual SDGs. This paper assesses the influence of some internal factors, such as the presence of universities on the internet, the level of internationalization or the availability of financial resources. Through both regression analyses and the Gephi method, our results confirm the importance of the presence on the internet, the internationalization of the university and the financial resources for research and infrastructure received from regional governments for Spanish public universities to make a greater contribution to SDGs.

This study seeks to understand whether the mainstream SRI leads to similar investment decisions in conventional and SRI pension funds. The SRI is expanding beyond specialised SRI funds and increasingly conventional pension funds are integrating firms with certain ESG criteria, in line with legitimacy-theory premises. This phenomenon raises the questions whether SRI and conventional portfolios are converging and whether SRI funds preserve their ethical essence. Using fund holdings and ESG-stock scores, we examine the inclusion level of ESG firms by UK conventional and SRI domestic equity pension funds, taking into account the investment in controversial (socially-sensitive) firms (i.e. related to tobacco, alcohol, or gambling industries, among others). We find that conventional funds consider the firms in which SRI funds invest to integrate ESG criteria. Nonetheless, SRI funds maintain larger ESG-firm standards, preserving the ethical purpose, and larger ESG standards in SRI funds do not affect performance. Our results also show that the ESG integration into conventional funds evolves over time.

An increasing percentage of the total net assets under professional management is devoted to ethical investments. Socially responsible investment (SRI) funds have a dual objective: building an investment strategy based on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) screens and providing financial returns to investors. In the current study, we investigate whether this dual objective has an influence on the behavior of mutual fund managers in the realization of gains and losses. Evidence has shown that most investors in SRI funds invest in those funds primarily because of their social concerns. If the motivations of SRI managers align with those of SRI investors, SRI managers might then have more incentives than conventional managers to hold onto losing stocks if they feel their social value compensates for the economic loss. We hypothesize that SRI managers would be less prone to the disposition effect than conventional managers. Pertaining to the disposition effect, we do not find evidence of a difference in the behavior of SRI fund managers compared with that of conventional fund managers. Our results hold, even when considering market trends, management structure, gender, and prior performance.

In this study, we analyse the effect of product differentiation on prices and clients’ attraction in the socially responsible (SR) mutual fund industry. Using three proxies for differentiation, including a text-based indicator, a return-based indicator, and a portfolio-holding indicator, we analyse a sample of US SR equity mutual funds in the period 1999–2019. Our findings show that the text differentiation measure better explains the product differentiation impact on prices and flows than the measures based on funds’ characteristics. Our text differentiation results indicate that younger SR funds and funds belonging to smaller families are more differentiated. In addition, differentiation allows SR funds to charge higher fees and attract more money flows. Finally, our results indicate that SR fund investors are sensitive to differentiation regarding other funds implementing the same SR strategies, but not in relation to other funds in the same Morningstar financial style category.

This paper aims to investigate the consequences of investing in a single fund family for investors. In essence, we focus on the correlation among portfolio holdings of funds with effects in terms of under-diversification for mutual fund investors, especially, if they invest in the same fund family. We also explore the fund manager autonomy in portfolio holding allocation within families and determine the characteristics of those fund families with higher autonomy. Our results show that a higher correlation among funds not only implies that families offer a lower diversification to investors; it also has a negative effect on their performance. However, investors’ performance benefits from a higher manager autonomy. Consequently, investors who select a single fund family could obtain higher returns in smaller fund families with considerable experience that do not belong to a banking or insurance group, as in the former, diversification and manager autonomy are higher.

This paper analyses the herding behaviour among exchanges around the expiration of bitcoin futures traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). The database extends from December 2017 to October 2020, taking as a reference the main exchanges that trade bitcoin (Binance, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Coinbase, itBit, Kraken, and Gemini) and using hourly closing prices and trading volumes in bitcoin and US dollars. Adapting the proposal of Chang, Cheng and Khorana (2000) (CCK) to test conditional herding, we obtain results that indicate that the herding effect is significant during the week before expiration. After expiration, the herding effect lasts for a few hours and disappears. Information overload originating, among other causes, from sophisticated investors’ strategies may generate this mimetic behaviour. The results show the relevance of intraday data applied to specific events such as expiration since the unconditional analysis shows, in general, anti-herding behaviour throughout the period of study.

This paper aims to contribute to the lack of research on the learning process of mutual fund markets. The empirical design is focused on the ability of the Spanish equity mutual fund industry to learn from its important errors. The choice of this industry is justified by both its relevance in the European mutual fund markets and some specific characteristics, such as the concentration and the banking control of the industry, which may affect the learning process. Our main objectives are to identify important trading errors in mutual fund management by applying three independent filters based on the relative importance of each decision, and then testing the evolution of these errors both at the industry level and at the fund family level. We apply the dynamic model of generalized method of moments (GMM), and we find an overall significant decrease in the percentage of important trading errors over time, thereby providing evidence of the global learning process of the industry. In addition, we find that a large number of fund families drive this evidence. Finally, we obtain that the family size and its dependence on financial groups do not seem to play significant roles in explaining the learning process. Therefore, we conclude that fund managers have incentives to learn from their important trading errors, in order to avoid them in future decisions, due to their serious negative consequences on fund performance, regardless of the characteristics of the families to which they belong.

The recent emergence of COVID-19 and the subsequent short-selling restriction (SSR) imposed on some equity markets provide us with a unique framework to analyze the effects of this kind of measure on market quality in the context of increasingly automated equity markets. We contribute to the literature by analyzing the microstructure and quality parameters of the Spanish equity market during COVID-19 and SSR. We study four subperiods, namely pre-crisis, turmoil, SSR, and first de-escalation periods, by means of a tick-by-tick dataset and the complete limit order book (LOB). We observe the following impact of the SSR on the constituents of IBEX 35: (1) the SSR did comply partially with its aim at an intraday level regarding volatility, but liquidity was reduced; (2) liquidity deterioration affected more the sell than the buy side of the LOB; (3) high-frequency activity (HFT) diminished during SSR, reinforcing volatility; (4) negative effects on liquidity and HFT diminished and disappeared as the ban was lifted; (5) HFT unidirectionally Granger causes 1 min realized volatility while the natural logarithm of the slope of the LOB bidirectionally Granger causes 1 min realized volatility.

Considering that the most distinct trading decisions are crucial to evaluate the ability of fund managers to add value, this paper aims to examine the trading divergence level among mutual funds and to capture its determinants and its performance consequences. We propose a measure that is more informative than the traditional overlap metrics, providing evidence of a positive and significant trend of fund trading divergence over time, especially after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008. Our results also show a negative influence of market stress on the trading divergence level. Interestingly, we find greater contribution to subsequent fund performance in the divergent portions of trading decisions.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the imitation behavior of investors in especially convulsed periods, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the recent global pandemic, both of which could affect investors'' emotions and behavior, although both have different characteristics and might have different implications. The cross-sectional dispersion of returns is used to measure the level of herding in the markets of Spain and Portugal, using a survivorship-bias-free dataset of daily stock returns during the period January 2000–May 2021, in turn divided into several sub-periods classified as pre-2008 crisis, 2008 crisis, post-2008 crisis, Covid-19 and post Covid-19. Additionally, the existence is studied of differences between days of positive and negative returns, or between days of high volatility compared to the rest, and whether the cross-sectional dispersion of returns in one market is affected by the cross-sectional dispersion of returns in the other market. The results indicate that herding appears with greater intensity in periods prior to the crisis, disappearing during the financial crisis and reappearing, although with less intensity, after it, while it is not generally detected in Covid-19 times. However, herding behavior can be observed in the market during the pandemic on high volatility days.

In this research, we tested the existence of ethical window dressing in the Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) domestic equity funds registered in the US market. For this purpose, we compared the environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) attributes of disclosed and undisclosed portfolios. We reject that the ESG portfolio image is significantly better in reporting months than in non-reporting months. Examining portfolio trading based on different proxies, we found residual signals of ethical window dressing. None of these signals correspond to easy-to-interpret information. Thus, SRI funds do not manipulate the disclosed ESG image to attract money flows.

Although herding constitutes one of the most widely researched behavioral trading patterns internationally, the possibility of cross-market herding has remained largely underexplored in the literature. Our study provides a detailed empirical investigation of this issue in the context of ten Asia-Pacific markets for the February 1995–March 2022 window. We find that all ten markets’ “herds” project significant relationships with each other, with causality being identified within a minority of those relationships. These results are robust when controlling for financial crises (Asian; global financial; global pandemic) and US market returns.

Aunque el pastoreo constituye uno de los patrones de comportamiento comercial más investigados a nivel internacional, la posibilidad del pastoreo entre mercados ha permanecido en gran medida poco explorada en la literatura. Nuestro estudio proporciona una investigación empírica detallada de esta cuestión en el contexto de diez mercados de Asia y el Pacífico para el período comprendido entre febrero de 1995 y marzo de 2022. Encontramos que los “rebaños” de los diez mercados proyectan relaciones significativas entre sí, identificándose causalidad dentro de una minoría de esas relaciones. Estos resultados son sólidos cuando se controlan las crisis financieras (asiática; financiera global; pandemia global) y los retornos del mercado estadounidense.

Sustainability stock indices play an important role in guiding socially responsible funds to their constituents. Thus, to find out whether the term sustainability is more than just a label, we analyze the inclusion and exclusion criteria applied by sustainability indices, and we compare them with those applied by conventional indices. We analyze the level of sustainability and size of the companies included in and excluded from five sustainability indices compared to a control group of 11 conventional indices. Our results show that the level of sustainability influences the inclusion process and, to a lesser extent, the exclusion process of the five FTSE4Good indices. However, we find similar results for several conventional indices. In addition, the size criterion dominates the sustainability criterion in the inclusion and exclusion processes of sustainability indices like in conventional indices. Further, we use different cluster algorithms to determine that the inclusion and exclusion processes of four of the five sustainability indices are different from those of the conventional indices. Our results validate the use of the “sustainability” label for four of five sustainability indices but also show that further differentiation between sustainability and conventional indices is needed.

Some microfinance institutions (MFIs) can drift from their social mission, generating well-studied effects for their borrowers. We focus on the lesser-known effect of mission drift on the financial return to other stakeholders (employees, government, micro-savers, and banking creditors). Using a sample of 534 MFIs, we calculated the economic value distributed by the MFI to these stakeholders by considering salaries, taxes, and interest paid. We found a negative relationship between average loan size and return to employees (RTE), government, and banking creditors, and a positive relationship between women borrowers and RTE and government. This is explained by the fact that mission-focused MFIs are usually small, labor-intensive institutions with a stable business model. We found a positive relationship between average loan size and return to micro-savers, and a negative relationship between women borrowers and return to micro-savers. The reason is that many mission-focused MFIs do not offer micro-savings, undermining financial inclusion.

We examine the influence of managerial structures and characteristics on the level of trading divergence among fund families as well as their effects on the subsequent performance of those families. Fund families with fewer interactions between their funds and managers tend to diverge more in their trading decisions. We find a positive influence of this divergence on the performance of fund families not only in competitive but also in cooperative environments. This finding shows that if cooperation leads a fund family to make different trading decisions than their competitors, they have better results.

This research studies the factors that favour the establishment of high-investment infrastructure public-private partnership (PPP) projects. We analyse 9121 PPPs, hosted in 107 developing countries, in the period 1997–2017. We find that PPP projects adopting contractual forms in which the private party takes more risks, awarded through competitive methods and benefitting from indirect government support programmes, are characterized by a larger investment volume. A more business-friendly economy and robust institutions configure the most conducive environment to establish larger investment PPPs. Furthermore, multilateral development banks’ support of the projects relates positively to their investment volume.

In this research, we analyse the impact of the institutional distance between investor and investee countries on the risk-adjusted financial performance for a broad sample of US-based international mutual funds in the period 1997-2021 (1,704 equity mutual funds/106,521 monthly portfolios). Our results show that a greater institutional distance jeopardizes mutual fund financial performance. Another relevant finding is that holding a more country-concentrated portfolio positively impacts financial performance. In addition, we reveal an interaction effect between the two variables, meaning that the portfolio country concentration moderates the negative impact of institutional distance, supporting the information advantage theory.

This paper studies the monthly expiration effect in the bitcoin markets. The emergence of trading in bitcoin futures in regulated markets is an ideal occasion to test this effect on an asset with singular characteristics. Our results with intraday data show that around the time of maturity there are significant changes in the trading volume, volatility and return of bitcoin, an asset that is traded in many exchanges simultaneously. Therefore, there is a clear expiration effect related to bitcoin futures. The closer to the expiration time (shortly beforehand or afterwards), the more intense these effects are. However, in spite of these general results, the expiration effect is not homogeneous across exchanges and depends on the characteristics of the futures contract in question. Robustness tests are also applied to confirm the results. The increasing participation of institutional investors is consistent with our findings, particularly in relation to the expiration effects of cash-settled futures, as these contracts are more appealing for sophisticated investors who could be interested in arbitrage or speculative processes.

Using a unique database that includes publicly disclosed fund holdings at the end of the quarter as well as the holdings in all non-publicly disclosed months, we found that some funds could alter their portfolios in publicly disclosed months to artificially increase their Active Share scores and consequently appear more active and take advantage of the positive relationship between Active Share and money flows. We show how, consistent with non-informed trades, these funds erode their future performance. However, these funds reach their objective of increasing future money flows. Moreover, we find that window-dresser funds can be identified by controlling the level of tracking error. The funds with high Active Share scores and low tracking errors have the highest levels of Active Share window dressing and the worst future returns. However, compared with less active funds, they are able to capture higher money flows.

This paper studies, for the first time, socially responsible (SR) mutual fund exits. We analyse a sample of 534 U.S. SR equity mutual funds in the period 2003–2017, in which 182 exit events occurred (53 liquidations, 109 mergers within the same family, and 20 mergers across different families). The results obtained indicate that both liquidations and mergers are more likely among smaller funds that suffer net money outflows in the previous year to the event. At the family level, mergers are more frequent in outperforming families with a larger number of funds, whereas liquidations occur in families with a lower number of funds. When comparing mergers within the same family with mergers across different families, we observe that the former share more drivers with liquidations than the latter. In addition, we observe that religious and environmental funds are more likely to suffer exit events than other SR fund types. Finally, other interesting findings point out that mergers financially benefit investors in merged SR mutual funds and the financial outcomes of acquiring fund investors are not jeopardized.

Purpose: This study aims to examine style-deviation practices in the socially responsible mutual funds (SMRF) industry i.e. how mutual funds game their stated financial objectives to earn a higher relative performance ranking. In addition, the consequences of such practices on sustainable scores and money flows are studied.
Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 454 US equity SRMFs is studied. This paper uses panel regressions controlling for time and style fixed-effects.
Findings: This study finds that 17.60% of SRMF managers in the sample are engaged in style deviation practices. These practices positively impact the sustainable performance of SRMFs and negatively impact their financial performance. One effect offsets the other and they consequently do not affect money flows. Another finding is that only investors with lower portfolio sustainability scores do show return-chaser behaviour.
Practical implications: This paper reveals that SRMF managers deviating from their stated financial style face a dilemma that is non-existent for their conventional peers that is style deviation practices affect financial and sustainable performance in opposing ways, whereas SRMF investor utility depends positively on both dimensions. The findings are not conclusive about the effectiveness of style deviation practices in attracting SRMF money flows.
Social implications: SRMF industry has experienced tremendous growth in the past decade. The increased competition in this industry has led managers to strive to attract investors, sometimes by relying on irregular practices that enhance their portfolio results. Regulators should consider how to avoid such perverse behaviour with a view to improving mutual funds transparency.
Originality/value: This is the first research that analyses style deviation practices and their consequences for the SRMF industry.

We analyse the performance and performance persistence of US socially responsible investment (SRI) managers from a managers’ perspective, differentiating between specialist managers (only running SRI mutual funds) and non-specialists (running SRI and conventional mutual funds). We find that the SRI fund nature has a significantly negative influence on the non-specialist performance. Furthermore, top managers of both groups persistently outperform SRI funds. However, non-specialist managers obtain superior performance to specialist managers, perhaps because of learning synergies in both fund niches. Results also show more persistence with non-specialists, especially with regard to conventional mutual funds.

Despite the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) firm controversies, little is known about their effect on institutional investors. We study the most important institutional investors worldwide: pension funds and mutual funds. The separation between fund management and ownership raises the need to examine how fund managers and fund participants react to investee-firms'' CSR controversies. Considering the conventional/Socially Responsible Investment (SRI-fund nature, we find that investee-firms'' controversies diversely affect fund performance, depending on the controversy type. Furthermore, participants and managers of SRI pension and SRI mutual funds display a passive behavior toward controversies. These attitudes are consistent with enduring behavior and continuity investment policies, such as amending/controlling CSR-firm controversies. In contrast, conventional pension-fund and conventional mutual-fund participants seem guided by traditional investment rules to deal with unsatisfactory situations and respond to controversies after managerial decisions regarding these events with negative reactions. Finally, firms developing CSR-engagement strategies may soften market and managerial reactions toward controversies. Nonetheless, symbolic CSR-engagement practices arouse participants'' responses. JEL CLASSIFICATION: G11, G23, M14

The growing prominence of public–private partnerships featuring concessions has become a focal point in the management realm. Concession agreements, often spanning numerous years, imbue projects with continuity and stability. Through the theory of neo-institutionalism, we analyse the influence of formal and informal institutions on the duration of these projects across diverse countries, showing the pivotal role played by the institutional environment and consensus mechanisms in ensuring the success of such collaborative endeavours. The findings furnish valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers by facilitating the identification of optimal conditions to establish enduring and highly effective concession agreements.

In this article, we present a methodological approach to address spatial disparity in global data representation, introducing an algorithm called Flexible Mapping to Understand Spatial Analysis (FLEMUSA). We utilize world maps to depict various data points across countries, revealing substantial variation among them. However, conventional choropleth maps often fail to effectively represent regions with sparse data, obscuring valuable insights. To mitigate this issue, we propose interactive graphical methods in both two and three dimensions, implemented through open-source Python code accessible via Google Colab. Our approach includes several contributions such as excluding countries without data from the representation, scaling magnitudes within country borders, focusing on regional analysis, and using logarithmic scales for bubble maps proportional to country sizes. Additionally, we offer interactive 2D and 3D representations, rotatable3D representations, and zoomable options, facilitating enhanced visualization of regional similarities amidst data heterogeneity. Through this algorithm, we aim to improve the clarity and interpretability of spatial data analysis, integrating solutions for extreme data overdispersion, all programmed with open-source code
-Utilization of world maps for visual representation of data across countries mitigating the overdispersion step by step
-Implementation of graphical methods, including interactive 2D and 3D maps, to address spatial disparity.
-Provision of open-source code for customizable graphical representations, facilitating implementation in online journals as interactive code snippets

A growing fraction of individual investors delegate their portfolio management to professional managers. As a result, the importance of transparency and investor protections have increased in financial markets. In Spain, management companies must report their mutual fund portfolios quarterly to investors. However, this information may be disclosed on a monthly basis to private information providers. In this study, we examine the influence of performance on voluntary portfolio disclosure from 2003 to 2013. The transparency and reporting strategies may differ from fund industries with different level of development, we will discuss the implications of the results for emerging markets. We find a positive significant relationship between the probability of fund portfolio disclosure and fund performance, and this effect is more significant when we consider risk-adjusted performance measures. The addition of some control variables in the model shows that the probability of the fund portfolio to be reported is positively related to fund age, management company size and fees and is negatively related to fund size.

In this research, I study the exposure of Socially Responsible mutual funds (SR) to black industries (i.e., carbon-intensive sectors: fossil fuel, metal and utilities) and its effect on the financial performance. To this purpose, I analyze the industry portfolio allocation of a sample of 136 actively-managed US SR mutual funds, investing in domestic and global equity, in the period January 2012–December 2018. I observe that the average weight of black industries in these portfolios is 9.51% falling over time (13.45% in 2012 versus 7.40% in 2018). Another finding is that a greater exposure to fossil fuel and metal industries negatively impacts the portfolios'' financial performance. In addition, SR funds managed by firms located in Republican-leaning states and in states with greater CO2 emissions per capita, are more exposed to carbon-intensive industries, suggesting that SR funds'' managers could be influenced by local factors when making their investment decisions. Finally, I observe that SR funds marketed under “low-carbon” labels live up to their name and are less exposed to fossil fuel and metal industries than other types of SR funds.

E-commerce is a fast-growing industry that attracts many entrepreneurs; however, the survival rate is lower than that of other industries. Entrepreneurs take many strategic decisions that have a significant bearing on the success of their e-commerce ventures. Two are particularly salient for our research: Is it better to start as a pure-click or open a physical store? To what extent should e-commerce ventures internationalize? We also wonder if it is worth reviewing the first annual accounts available. Grounding on organizational ecology theory, we develop a model hypothesizing that (1) the brick-and-click strategy favours survival; (2) internationalization favours survival; (3) firm size and financial health matter; (4) earnings management mediates the relationship between financial health and survival; and (5) the brick-and-click and internationalization strategies mediate the relationship between size and survival. The empirical study is performed by analysing seven years of data on 632 new e-commerce ventures using non-parametric means tests, a Cox regression, and a generalized structural equation model. The study tests the strategies followed by e-commerce entrepreneurs and firm characteristics that influence survival. We find that the risk of bankruptcy is 1.437 times greater for pure-click than for brick-and-click retailers, 2.778 times greater for local players than for internationalized firms, and 1.787 times greater for unprofitable firms than for profitable firms. Hence, it is worth analysing the financial statements provided by entrepreneurs; however, signs of earnings management should be checked. All these factors affect the probability of early bankruptcy as well as explain survival several years later.

Purpose: Some scholars argue that corruption hinders economies and investment because it generates extra costs, while others suggest that it can act as a stimulus. Their mixed empirical findings have prompted the analysis of whether investors'' attitude towards corruption changes depending on its degree of prevalence. Design/methodology/approach: The authors examined 4, 518 public–private partnerships (PPPs) located in 46 developing countries for the period 1997–2017. The data were collected from the World Bank PPP database. The authors investigated the relationship between the amount of investment in PPP projects and the level of corruption using regression with multilevel mixed effects. Findings: Corruption and the amount of investment in PPP projects are inversely related at the low and high end of the spectrum of corruption, but the relationship is positive towards the middle. Further analysis revealed that this was spurred by high investment PPP projects in less developed countries. Originality/value: The findings allow the authors to reconcile the opposing positions in the literature through a “sand–grease–sand the wheels” effect between the volume of investment and corruption, which can be configured as a reverse S-shape consisting of three stages.

We study the existence of seasonality effects in USA SRI mutual funds from November 1990 to April 2019. We analyse whether SRI funds focus on non-financial aspects and reduce the importance of changing their behaviour in certain calendar periods with the purpose of achieving better performance in these seasons. Considering several investment areas (Asia, Europe, Japan, USA and global), we study the season patterns on monthly, quarterly, and second-half yearly basis. In general, our results do not show seasonality behaviour. Consequently, SRI mutual funds do not vary their behaviour in certain calendar periods, revealing a more stable investment conduct, consistent with non-financial preferences. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Using a unique database that includes publicly disclosed fund holdings at the end of the quarter as well as the holdings in all non-publicly disclosed months, we found that some funds could alter their portfolios in publicly disclosed months to artificially increase their Active Share scores and consequently appear more active and take advantage of the positive relationship between Active Share and money flows. We show how, consistent with non-informed trades, these funds erode their future performance. However, these funds reach their objective of increasing future money flows. Moreover, we find that window-dresser funds can be identified by controlling the level of tracking error. The funds with high Active Share scores and low tracking errors have the highest levels of Active Share window dressing and the worst future returns. However, compared with less active funds, they are able to capture higher money flows., This work was supported by the Spanish government and the European Union FEDER funds RTI2018-093483-B-I00.