Socially Responsible Investing: An Overcrowded Trade [Part Two]

This is part II of the series on socially responsible investing. See Part I here. Socially responsible investing: Underperforming Other studies have shown that socially responsible investments consistently underperform local benchmarks. A study entitled The Price of Ethics: Evidence from Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, by Renneboog, Luc and ter Horst, Jenke and Zhang, Chendi, published May 2007 showed that socially responsible investment funds in many European and Asia-Pacific countries strongly underperform domestic benchmark portfolios by about 5% per annum. Before the deduction of fees, the results were as follows: “Consistent with investors paying a price for ethics, SRI funds in…