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Socially Responsible Investment
Verónica Cañal Fernández, Blanca María, Pérez Gladish, María Victoria Rodríguez Uria, Amelia Bilbao Terol and Mar Arenas Parra |
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Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) has increased in recent years from being a marginal
rate of investment, followed by a few individual investors, to be a key investment for institutional
investors and high interest to individual investors. Currently, in more than 40 countries worldwide
including developing countries like Brazil or South Africa, it is possible to invest in Socially Responsible
Investment Funds (SRIF) that check the Corporate Social Responsibility in which they
invest, in one way or another.
The growth in SRI has been accompanied by an increase in the number of scientific publications
on the subject, most of which have focused on analyzing if social responsibility profile of an
investment involves a financial cost in terms of profitability and risk. However, studies on the
existence of a relationship between social performance and financial performance of SRI, do not
reach unanimous conclusions and either there are conclusive studies that compare the financial
performance of socially responsible and conventional funds. Many works in the literature, attempt
to justify the lack of consensus on the results of these studies indicating that the main reasons
relate to the definition of ISR, the differences in the methodologies used in the selected variables
and the horizon and sample size used in the works.
The ISR concept has evolved throughout history and shows differences between countries that
respond to different motivations of investors, therefore this study aims to review the scientific
literature on the definition of ISR and the motivation and characteristics investors, which allow
understanding the complexity of a seemingly simple concept.
According to the authors, understanding this concept will contribute to understand the reasons for
the lack of consensus in the results on the relationship between financial and social performance
of socially responsible investments.
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