Over the last few decades, growing attention to the topic of social responsibility has affected financial markets and institutional authorities. Indeed, recent environmental, social, and financial crises have inevitably led regulators and investors to take into account the sustainable investing issue; however, the question of how Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria impact financial portfolio performances is still open. In this work, we examine a multi-objective optimization model for portfolio selection, where we add to the classical Mean-Variance analysis a third non-financial goal represented by the ESG scores. The resulting optimization problem, formulated as a convex quadratic programming, consists of minimizing the portfolio variance with parametric lower bounds on the levels of the portfolio expected return and ESG. We provide here an extensive empirical analysis on five datasets involving real-world capital market indexes from major stock markets. Our empirical findings typically reveal the presence of two behavioral patterns for the 16 Mean-Variance-ESG portfolios analyzed. Indeed, over the last fifteen years we can distinguish two non-overlapping time windows on which the inclusion of portfolio ESG targets leads to different regimes in terms of portfolio profitability. Furthermore, on the most recent time window, we observe that, for the US markets, imposing a high ESG target tends to select portfolios that show better financial performances than other strategies, whereas for the European markets the ESG constraint does not seem to improve the portfolio profitability.

This study addresses market concentration among major corporations, highlighting the utility of relative entropy for understanding diversification strategies. It introduces entropic value at risk (EVaR) as a coherent risk measure, which is an upper bound to the conditional value at risk (CVaR), and explores its generalization, relativistic value at risk (RLVaR), rooted in Kaniadakis entropy. Through extensive empirical analysis on both developed (i.e., S&P 500 and Euro Stoxx 50) and developing markets (i.e., BIST 100 and Bovespa), the study evaluates entropy-based criteria in portfolio selection, investigates model behavior across different market types, and assesses the impact of cryptocurrency introduction on portfolio performance and diversification. The key finding indicates that entropy measures effectively identify optimal portfolios, particularly in scenarios of heightened risk and increased concentration, crucial for mitigating negative net performances during low returns or high turnover. Bitcoin is primarily used for diversification and performance enhancement in the BIST 100 index, while its allocation in other markets remains minimal or non-existent, confirming the extreme concentration observed in stock markets dominated by a few leading stocks.

The objective of the present paper is to propose a new method to measure the recovery performance of a portfolio of non-performing loans (NPLs) in terms of recovery rate and time to liquidate. The fundamental idea is to draw a curve representing the recovery rates over time, here assumed discretized, for example, in years. In this way, the user can get simultaneously information about recovery rate and time to liquidate of the portfolio. In particular, it is discussed how to estimate such a curve in the presence of right-censored data, e.g., when the NPLs composing the portfolio have been observed in different time periods, with a method based on an algorithm that is usually used in the construction of survival curves. The curves obtained are smoothed with nonparametric statistical learning techniques. The effectiveness of the proposal is shown by applying the method to simulated and real financial data. The latter are about some portfolios of Italian unsecured NPLs taken over by a specialized operator.

The recovery performance of a portfolio of Non-Performing Loans can be measured in terms of recovery rate and liquidation time jointly through a “recovery curve” representative of recovery rates over time. When portfolio heterogeneity is very high, it is informative to estimate more than just one curve by dividing the portfolio into several homogeneous subsets, i.e. clusters, and calculating a recovery curve for each of them. The aim of this work is to estimate the optimal portfolio partition and the smoothed recovery curves of each cluster by means of non-parametric statistical learning techniques.