Business Commons^™

Owning Green: Evaluating The Effects Of Actively Managed Sustainability Fund Ownership On Esg Scores, Caleb Young

CMC Senior Theses

The growing trend of acknowledging ESG performance as a material concern when conducting due diligence on investment opportunities has exacerbated the number of assets being managed by investors with sustainability-oriented goals. At the same time, as social and climate-related issues have become more intense, investors want to use their agency as shareholders to influence companies to act in ways that align with their values. Frequently, this can be most effectively achieved through proxy voting and corporate engagement, particularly if the fund is an active manager. This thesis explores the interaction between ESG-focused ETFs and mutual funds and their management style …

Do Socially Conscious Etfs Match Their Active Counterparts?, Ryan Cultice

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Over the past decade, Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) has grown at a rapid pace and, by some estimates, now represents a quarter of the $48 trillion in assets under professional management in the United States. At the same time, investors have broadly shifted from active to passive investing strategies. While there is significant research in each of these respective areas, we believe that we are the first to examine whether a socially conscious investor can employ a passive approach or if the constrained nature of SRI necessitates active management. As such, we examine the performance of socially conscious ETFs versus …

Determinants Of Hedge Fund Performance, Jun Duanmu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays which focus on the determinants of hedge fund performance. The first essay defines two distinct styles of active portfolio management: alpha active and beta active. I develop measures of beta activity and find ample evidence that top beta active managers deliver superior out-of-sample performance. In addition, I find that beta activity measure successfully captures the time varying nature of beta exposures that can be interpreted as the common factor driving the long term out-of-sample predictive power of both Systematic Risk and R2.

The second essay attempt to span the space of potential risk factors …

The Effects Of Asset Allocation And Active Management On Total Return Of Managed Funds, Florian Halili

Business and Economics Honors Papers

Portfolio managers are charged with maximizing returns for a given level of risk. There are practical problems that arise in creating an efficient portfolio and maintaining a target level of risk and return. This paper will identify two important factors that a manager needs to address in creating and managing a portfolio. The first step in creating a portfolio should be the establishment of the structure of the portfolio or the portfolio policy, what asset classes it holds and in what proportions. The structure of the portfolio is the main factor that shows how a portfolio is exposed to risk. …