We evaluated the financial performance of government bond portfolios formed according to socially responsible investment (SRI) criteria. We thus open a discussion on the financial performance of SRI for government bonds. Our sample includes 24 countries over the period of June 2006 to December 2017. Using various financial performance measures, the results suggest that high-rated government bonds, according to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions, outperform low-ranked bonds under any cut-off, although differences are not statistically significant. These findings suggest that ESG screenings can be used for government bonds without sacrificing financial performance.

Flip teaching (FT) is a methodology with a significant impact on the educational innovation trend that encourages active learning and facilitates the learning of students. The main objective of this study is to measure the impact of flip teaching on the learning of a course at a higher education institution. To analyze the differences in the exam marks between students that follow FT and other methodologies, the t-statistic and Mann–Whitney U test have been used. Results indicate that FT allows improving the performance of students and achieving collateral capacities, such as responsibility and awareness, making learning more sustainable. This study makes an interesting contribution to existing research in education and demonstrates that it is possible to introduce FT in a block of the course and can be transferable to other courses.

In this study, we address a lesser‐studied aspect of corporate social responsibility (CSR): distinguishing between investments in material versus immaterial CSR issues. The financial performance of stock portfolios formed according to material and general CSR issues is examined over the period 2007 to 2018 in the European Union and the United States. We find that materiality is relevant to finding the best and worst firms both in terms of CSR and financial performance, more significantly in the EU than in the US market. However, general CSR scores, including material and immaterial issues, do not discriminate the best firms.

We examine whether the Fama and French (1992) (F&F) model can be adapted to become a more versatile and flexible tool, capable of incorporating variations of company characteristics in a more dynamic form. For this, the risk factors are reconstructed at the end of each reading of monthly data. We argue that, over time, the evaluation of a company may change as a result of variations in its market price, size or book price, and we are aware that the F&F model does not accurately reflect these dynamics. Our results show that the adapted model is able to capture the behaviour of a greater number of stocks than the original F&F model and risk factors are more significant when building them through our procedure. In addition, we carry out these adaptations during a period of instability in financial markets.