På senare år har intresset för hållbarhet ökat i samhället. Allt fler vill bidra till samhället på ett positivt sätt genom att exempelvis källsortera, åka mindre bil eller minska på köttkonsumtionen. I och med det ökade intresset för hållbarhet, har även intresset för hållbara investeringsalternativ ökat. Studiens syfte är att undersöka sambandet mellan graden av hållbarhet och prestation hos fonder på den svenska fondmarknaden. Detta är en kvantitativ studie där totalt 32 svenskregistrerade fonder undersöks. Fonderna valdes ut från Morningstars onlineregister och jämfördes utifrån de fem hållbarhetsbetygen, där betyg 1 anses vara minst hållbart och betyg 5 är mest hållbart. Perioden som analyserades var 2015-01-01 till 2019-12-31. För att få fram ett resultat som kan besvara studiens frågeställningar användes faktisk avkastning, CAPM, Sharpekvot, Jensens alfa och Treynorkvot. Studien visar inte på några signifikanta resultat i att fonder presterar sämre desto hållbarare de är. Detta leder till slutsatsen att det inte går att bevisa att hållbara fonder presterar bättre eller sämre än konventionella fonder. / In later years, the interest for sustainability has increased in society. More and more people want to contribute to society in a positive way by for example, sorting at source, driving less with cars or reducing meat consumption. With the increased interest in sustainability, the interest in sustainable investment alternatives has also increased. The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between the degree of sustainability and performance of funds in the Swedish fund market. This is a quantitative study in which a total of 32 Swedish-registrered funds are examined. The funds were selected from Morningstar’s online register and compared on the basis of the five sustainability ratings, where grade 1 is considered as the least sustainable and grade 5 is the most sustainable. The period that was analyzed was 2015-01-01 to 2019-12-31. In order to get a result that can answer the questions of this study, actual return, CAPM, Sharpe ratio, Jensen’s alpha and Treynor ratio are used. The study does not show any significant results regarding the degree of sustainability and the performance. The conclusion regarding whether sustainable funds perform better or worse than conventional funds cannot be established.

Sweden is one of the countries in the world where investing in mutual funds is most prevalent among the population. The supply of funds in the market has increased significantly in recent decades as well as the public debate on ethical issues. This has contributed to the development of the market for ethical funds. There is no clear definition of what an ethical fund is but generally it is a fund that takes into account factors related to social responsibility in different ways. This study analyzes the ethical funds historical performance levels in comparison with the corresponding traditional mutual funds. Three questions have been answered with the help of quantitative and qualitative analysis. A computational model has been constructed in Excel to analyze historical data from a range of ethical funds and traditional mutual funds. The results of the calculations are the basis for the quantitative portion of the analysis. These have been supplemented by external expertise. The effects, which the commodity prices have had on the yield differences between traditional and ethical funds, have also been studied. In this study, the price of oil has been chosen to illustrate these effects. It is not possible to reliably reach any general conclusions about how ethical funds as a fund category have performed in comparison with the corresponding traditional mutual funds. However, a pattern is observed, that the risk levels for the selected ethical funds, during the periods studied when the market went sharply up or down, respectively, were higher in all cases. The reason for this seems to be the diversification problems that have arisen due to the ethical constraints, something that both the underlying theory on the subject and the discussion with one of Swedbank Roburs portfolio manager’s support. The increased level of risk has contributed to the fact that ethical funds have found it harder to reach an equivalent risk-adjusted rate of return when the bull and the bear markets were examined. / Sverige är ett av de länder i världen där sparandet i fonder är som mest utbrett bland befolkningen. Utbudet av fonder på marknaden har ökat markant de senaste decennierna och i takt med att samhällsdebatten kring etiska frågor ökat, har en ny marknad vuxit fram, marknaden för etiska fonder. Det finns ingen tydlig definition på vad en etisk fond är men generellt är det fonder som tar hänsyn till faktorer kopplade till socialt ansvarstagande på olika sätt. Denna undersökning analyserar etiska fonders historiska prestationsnivåer i jämförelse med motsvarande traditionella aktiefonder. Tre frågeställningar har besvarats med hjälp av kvantitativ och kvalitativ analys. En beräkningsmodell har byggts i Excel i syfte att analysera historisk data från ett urval av etiska fonder och traditionella aktiefonder. Resultaten från beräkningarna ligger till grund för den kvantitativa delen av analysen som därefter har diskuterats med extern expertis. Råvaruprisernas effekter på skillnader i avkastning mellan traditionella och etiska fonder har också analyserats. I denna undersökning har oljepriset valts för att studera dessa effekter. Det går inte att med säkerhet komma fram till några generella slutsatser kring hur etiska fonder som fondkategori presterat i jämförelse med motsvarande traditionella aktiefonder. Dock kan ett mönster observeras under de perioder som undersökts då marknaden gått kraftigt uppåt respektive neråt, nämligen att risknivåerna för de utvalda etiska fonderna varit högre i samtliga fall. Anledningen till detta tycks vara de diversifieringsproblem som uppstått till följd av de etiska restriktionerna, något som bakomliggande teori inom ämnet och intervju med en av Swedbank Roburs förvaltare stödjer. Den ökade risknivån bidrar till att de etiska fonderna haft svårare att uppnå en likvärdig riskjusterad avkastning när den uppåtgående och den nedåtgående perioden granskats.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(医学) / 甲第20241号 / 医博第4200号 / 新制||医||1020(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院医学研究科医学専攻 / (主査)教授 今中 雄一, 教授 川上 浩司, 教授 川村 孝 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Medical Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(社会健康医学) / 甲第20288号 / 社医博第77号 / 社新制||医||9(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院医学研究科社会健康医学系専攻 / (主査)教授 川上 浩司, 教授 一山 智, 教授 伊達 洋至 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Public Health / Kyoto University / DGAM

This research study examines the risk-adjusted performance and portfolio risk of 60 large cap equity funds - mutual funds - under Swedish management. These funds apply environmental, social and governance criteria in their investment strategies. The empirical context concerns the COVID-19 situation and the context is divided into three periods, before, during and after the COVID-19 crisis. The ESG concept, modern portfolio and stakeholder theories are used to develop a theoretical base for the study on which the hypotheses are based which are summarized in a conceptual model. Secondary data regarding ESG and risk-adjusted returns are collected for each fund based on which the sharpe ratios and standard deviations (total or portfolio risk) for each fund are calculated. While there are associations between ESG and portfolio risk, no associations are found between ESG and sharpe ratios. As a result, this confirms the fact that ESG could be characterized as a mechanism to protect against downside risk in poor economic times but no association was established that ESG could also be used as a mechanism to determine efficiency in terms of risk-adjusted performance

This study uses a sample of 600 companies from Europe to investigate the risk-adjusted returns of four portfolios with high and low ESG ratings between 2011 and 2021. Four asset pricing models and additional measures for risk and return are tested on different portfolio weights. The findings show that there are no statistical differences in risk-adjusted returns between portfolios with high and low ESG scores. These findings are evident when sole capital gain is considered, and when dividends are reinvested. Differences can however be discerned between portfolio weights. All portfolios show excess returns when adjusted for risk factors in the market. The results from this study contribute to the literature surrounding ESG assets by providing evidence of how high- and low-rated ESG stocks have performed in the European market. This study has practical implications for actors in the capital markets, as it is evident from the results that ESG ratings have no apparent effect on the risk-adjusted returns of a portfolio. If sustainability is of high importance, high ESG companies offer the advantage of aligning financial performance with stakeholder goals, as well as providing adequate returns.

This thesis aims to examine the relationship between ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) ratings and the performance of European stocks. The purpose of this study is to examine the existing evidence pertaining to this relationship and the contradictory results that have been offered by previous scholars. The sample used includes ESG and stock return data from Refinitiv for the years 2010 to 2021 on the European market (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom). An ESG portfolio approach is used as the econometric framework, where performance evaluation models such as the CAPM model developed by Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965), and Mossin (1966), Fama- and French (1992) 3-factor and Carhart (1997) 4-factor models are applied. The results obtained from this study could not show any significant alphas to prove a relationship between ESG ratings and stock performance. Thus, no abnormal returns should be expected by investors that use an active investment strategy based on ESG screening.

We consider two applications of control charts in health care. The first involves the comparison of four methods designed to detect an increase in the incidence rate of a rare health event, such as a congenital malformation. A number of methods have been proposed: among these are the Sets method, two modifications of the Sets method, and the CUSUM method based on the Poisson distribution. Many of the previously published comparisons of these methods used unrealistic assumptions or ignored implicit assumptions which led to misleading conclusions. We consider the situation where data are observed as a sequence of Bernoulli trials and propose the Bernoulli CUSUM chart as a desirable method for the surveillance of rare health events. We compare the steady-state average run length performance of the Sets methods and its modifications to the Bernoulli CUSUM chart under a wide variety of circumstances. Except in a very few instances we find that the Bernoulli CUSUM chart performs better than the Sets method and its modifications for the extensive number of cases considered. The second application area involves monitoring clinical outcomes, which requires accounting for the fact that each patient has a different risk of death prior to undergoing a health care procedure. We propose a risk-adjusted survival time CUSUM chart (RAST CUSUM) for monitoring clinical outcomes where the primary endpoint is a continuous, time-to-event variable that is right censored. Risk adjustment is accomplished using accelerated failure time regression models. We compare the average run length performance of the RAST CUSUM chart to the risk-adjusted Bernoulli CUSUM chart, using data from cardiac surgeries to motivate the details of the comparison. The comparisons show that the RAST CUSUM chart is more efficient at detecting deterioration in the quality of a clinical procedure than the risk-adjusted Bernoulli CUSUM chart, especially when the fraction of censored observations is not too high. We address details regarding the implementation of a prospective monitoring scheme using the RAST CUSUM chart. / Ph. D.

We are currently in the golden age of sustainable investing much thanks to the increasedimportance of companies acting responsibly and sustainably. ESG reporting practices aredrastically improving globally. However, emerging market equities remain remarkablyunderrepresented compared to developed market equities in institutional investors’sustainability portfolios. One of the most popular sustainable investing practices is ESG investing. Over the years, institutional investors have developed several ESG investingstrategies. A relatively new and upcoming strategy which is expected to growtremendously over the coming years is thematic ESG investing which differentiates itselfcompared to more traditional strategies. To the author’s knowledge, very few studies havebeen conducted comparing the performance of ESG investment strategies against eachother, especially comparing thematic ESG versus more traditional ESG investingstrategies in emerging markets. This study found that emerging market based thematic ESG portfolios built around thetheme of clean energy perform better financially compared to more traditional emergingmarket-based non-thematic ESG portfolios. Hence, answering our stated researchquestion “How do Clean Energy focused thematic ESG investment portfolios performcompared to non-thematic ESG portfolios in emerging markets?”. Thematic clean energyportfolios rebalanced annually and quarterly performed better in almost every aspect(return, risk and risk/return) compared to broader non-thematic ESG portfolios during ourselected 5-year period, indicating that thematic investing may be the better strategy toadopt if investing sustainably in emerging markets. This study also found evidenceindicating that emerging market-based thematic clean energy portfolios may performbetter than their developed market counterpart. These findings should persuade investorsto finally break the norm and allocate more capital towards emerging market equities,unlocking the potential for previously hidden diversification opportunities. By analyzingthe performance differences through the lens of existing financial theories, this studymanages to also break new ground within the field of sustainable investing literatureadding new valuable insights while also challenging already existing financial theoriessuch as the efficient market hypothesis. This is a quantitative comparative study utilizing a deductive approach, where the authorshave created and compared the performance of sustainable equity portfolios in emergingmarkets. The Carhart four-factor model was applied through OLS regression to explainthe excess returns of the portfolios, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to predictfuture movements of the portfolios while multiple performance metrics such as Sharpe,Sortino, and Treynor were calculated and compared.

This study investigates the impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) ratings on the risk-adjusted returns of fintech firms across different segments, including fintech banks, paytech, wealth tech, fintech infrastructure, and cryptocurrency firms. Using a sample dataset comprising 104 worldwide fintech firms spanning the period from 2012 to 2022, we employ regression analysis to assess the relationship between ESG ratings and stock returns, considering both overall ESG scores and individual pillar ratings. Our findings reveal unique associations between ESG ratings and risk-adjusted returns, varying across different segments of the fintech industry. While high ESG-rated fintech firms exhibit a negative impact on stock returns, low ESG-rated firms show no significant association. Moreover, the environmental pillar rating demonstrates a negative correlation with risk-adjusted returns, whereas social and governance pillar ratings display a positive relationship. Furthermore, infrastructure fintech firms exhibit adistinct pattern, with overall ESG, social and governance ratings positively associated with stock returns. These results highlight the importance of considering ESG factors in evaluating the financial performance of fintech firms, with implications for investors, policymakers and industry practitioners. The study contributes to the existing literature by providing insights into how ESG considerations influence the risk-return profile of fintech firms, offering valuable guidance for sustainable investment strategies in the rapidly evolving fintech landscape.