Ethical Investment Processes and Outcomes

There is a growing body of literature on ethical or socially responsible investment across a range of disciplines. This paper highlights the key themes in the field and identifies some of the major theoretical and practical challenges facing both scholars and practitioners. One of these challenges is understanding better the complexity of the relationship between such investment practices and corporate behaviour. Noting that ethical investment is seldom characterised by agreement about what it actully constitutes, and that much of the extant research focuses on a narrow set of issues, the paper argues that there are benefits associated with examining ethical investment as a process.     

The Investment Performance of Socially Responsible Investment Funds in Australia

Interest in the notion of the possible financial sacrifice suffered by socially responsible investment (SRI) fund investors for considering ethical, social and environmental issues in their investment decisions has spawned considerable academic interest in the performance of SRI funds. Both the Australian and international research literature have yielded largely mixed results. However, several of these studies are hampered by methodological problems which can obscure the significance of reported results, such as the use of small sample sizes, inconsistencies in the time frames selected to analyse performance and different modelling frameworks used to estimate investment returns. This study attempts to redress some of these issues by investigating the returns performance of 89 ethical funds in Australia over the period 1986–2005. Using a multi-factor CAPM model [Fama, E. F., and K. R. French (1996) J. Finance 51(1), 55] (which controls for factors such as size, book-to-market value and momentum) we find that ethical funds significantly under-perform the market in Australia, particularly in the most recent 5 years of our sample period (2000–2005). Risk adjusted returns (using Jensen’s alpha) indicate that average annual underperformance is around 1.52% in the 2000–2005 period for our sample and .88% over the whole sample period. Our results contrast with many previous studies (both Australian and international), which have not found statistically significant differences in the performance of ethical funds relative to market benchmarks and/or a matched sample of conventional funds. Stewart Jones is a Professor of Accounting with the University of Sydney, appointed in 2001. His research interests embrace credit risk modelling, capital markets research, standard setting and accounting theory. Sandra van der Laan is a lecturer in the Discipline of Accounting at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on accounting as a social discourse and accounting as a mechanism to discharge a broad range of corporate accountabilities. Geoff Frost is an Associate Professor of Accounting at the University of Sydney. His research interests include corporate social responsibility and ethical investment. Janice Loftus is a senior lecturer in accounting at the University of Sydney. Her current research interests include financial accounting and corporate social responsibility reporting.     

Economic effects of rules of origin

Economic Effects of Rules of Origin. — Rules of origin exist because governments wish to discriminate amongst products on the basis of their “country of origin”. Since the components and activities that make up the total value added of many products are not created in a single location, rules to define a unique geographical source for products must be somewhat arbitrary, and inevitably introduce distortions into production and trade patterns as producers seek to provide their products with the most favourable origin. This paper considers the structure of such rules and their economic consequences.     

中印熊市为何尚未严重拖累经济？

即使在全球信贷危机发生前，许多跨国企业就对中国和印度的新兴中产阶级寄予厚望。目前美国经济可能正步入衰退，来自这两个人口逾10亿的亚洲大国新消费者的需求，也就显得更为重要。     

Trade Liberalization and Technology Choice

This paper considers the links between trade liberalization and technology choice in the nonliberalizing country. Trade‐liberalization‐induced changes in relative product prices have direct effects on equilibrium relative factor returns. The consequent changes in relative input costs may also lead producers to switch to alternative technologies, which will in turn induce a further indirect change in relative factor returns. Will this indirect affect exacerbate or ameliorate the direct effect on relative factor returns? It is found that this depends on the relative cost savings across sectors and factor cost shares.