Real Estate Investment Trusts is suggested as an attractive addition to mixed-asset portfolio. This study develops several hypothesized portfolio and tests whether REITs can actually increase diversification benefits of investors. We use mean-variance spanning test by Kan and Zhou (2008) to examine whether adding a REITs into portfolio can significantly expand efficient frontier in either global minimum variance portfolio or tangency portfolio. We assume our investors hold portfolio in the four markets, namely Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and US markets for period from March 2005 to February 2008. Three hypotheses are tested under various assumed conditions. The first hypothesis, which is REITs can provide diversification benefit, is confirmed in all these four markets. In addition, we find, for Taiwan domestic investors, holding international REITs in their portfolio rather than only Taiwan¡¦s REITs will provide more diversification benefit. The second hypothesis, which is holding period will affect diversification benefit, is not supported. However, this could be resulted from a test of short period in this study. The final hypothesis, which is different investment portfolio will affect the diversification benefit of RETIs for Taiwan domestic investors, is confirmed. Our results also suggest that expanding of efficient frontier are mainly from global minimum variance portfolio rather than tangency portfolio.

There is no clear consensus about whether green investments perform better, worse orequal to conventional brown investments. With the rising popularity of socialinvestments, it becomes increasingly important to understand these investments. Therecent launch of the MSCI Climate Paris Aligned Indices (CPAI) aim to illustrate thedevelopment of an economy that is in line with the requirements and goals of the ParisAgreement from 2015. In this research we aim to find out whether the MSCI Europe,USA and EM Climate Paris Aligned Indices outperform their parent indices. We do thisby comparing performance measures such as the net return, standard deviation of netreturns and Sharpe ratio. We further conduct an ordinary least squares regression to testwhether the betas and Jensen´s alphas of the CPAI differ significantly from their parentindices.The results show that only the USA CPAI clearly outperforms its parent index. This isdue to it having a higher Sharpe Ratio and Jensen’s alpha as well as higher monthly netreturns and a lower standard deviation compared to its parent index. The regressionshows that it does perform better than the parent index. The results for the EM CPAIshow that it performs in a similar way as its parent index. It has a higher monthly netreturn but also slightly higher standard deviation which leads to an equally large Sharperatio. Neither the estimated Jensen’s alpha nor the beta are significantly different fromthose of its parent index and thus the hypothesis of it performing equally as well as itsparent index cannot not be rejected. Lastly, the Europe CPAI has a higher Sharpe ratio,Jensen’s alpha and monthly net returns than its parent index, but it also exhibits a higherstandard deviation. The regression indicated that it performs in a similar way as itsparent index, no difference could be proven. In conclusion, this means that all CPAIperform at least equally as well as their parent indices, if not better.