This article studies the returns of 80 European and 64 US funds and attempts to identify whether those funds that invest in companies following environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles differ from conventional funds in terms of performance. The alpha, Sharpe ratio, Treynor ratio, and excess daily returns are used as various measures of performance. The five-factor Fama-French model is also applied to distinguish possible different influences of explanatory variables on ESG and non-ESG funds. This article follows the matched pair approach for fund evaluation (developed by Mallin, Saadouni, and Briston 1995) on 4 years of data (2017–2021). The empirical findings do not reveal any statistically significant difference between ESG and non-ESG funds although the former have slightly higher returns than the latter. The article adds to the early evidence of Statman (2000); Renneboog, ter Horst, and Zhang (2008a); and others on investing according to ESG criteria while acknowledging that the benefits are likely to be associated with investor’s demands and awareness of the environment, society, and corporate governance issues.

A number of papers have dealt with commodity financialization finding strong evidence for its existence and its effect on commodity prices and volatility. We chose convenience yield (CY) to study the effect of commodity financialization based on the theory of storage and on the argument that CY resembles a call option. Using quarterly data in the period 1995–2018, on soybeans stocks, cash and futures prices, a dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag with Exogenous model is estimated to measure the effects of independent variables from both the financial and commodity markets on CY. The evidence reveals that financial markets volatility along macroeconomic global variables affect soybeans CY giving support to the existence of commodity financialization. Besides, we find a statistically significant and negative relation between volatility index and CY. Support for this evidence rests on the theory of storage, Real Option Analysis, and behavioral finance.

This study empirically isolates the marginal CO₂ abatement efficiency of wind and solar power within the Greek electricity system, utilizing hourly dispatch data from August 2012 to December 2018—a period characterizing the grid’s “pre-saturation” technical potential. By employing an econometric framework to capture ex-post displacement dynamics, we identify a statistically significant but highly heterogeneous abatement impact across renewable technologies. Our analysis reveals that wind power consistently achieves higher carbon savings per MWh than solar photovoltaics, primarily by driving deeper displacement of carbon-intensive thermal baseload. Conversely, solar generation exhibits a stronger propensity to displace zero-carbon hydroelectric output and net imports, thereby dampening its domestic abatement efficiency. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the marginal emissions avoided are non-linear, fluctuating significantly with system load, interconnection flows, and renewable penetration levels. These findings establish an “unconstrained efficiency” benchmark for the Greek grid, providing the necessary counterfactual to evaluate the diminishing returns and curtailment penalties characterizing the high-penetration era of renewables.