The study aims to verify whether the consideration of a risk measure based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors can reduce the difference between the ex‐ante financial risk and ex‐post volatility of financial assets. The statistical models are run on 17,996 firm‐year observations (3332 active firms from 55 countries and 10 industries, listed on the ECPI Global Ethical Equity index) in 2007–2015. According to our main results, the forecasting effectiveness of traditional financial risk measures can be improved by integrating financial risk with an ESG risk measure that considers the ESG entropy. We found that the dispersion of ESG scores within a country, sector and year is a risk factor that would be helpful in predicting the volatility of financial assets. Other similar long‐run risk measures, such as issuers' credit ratings, do not reveal the same forecasting power. By reducing unexpected volatility, especially in the medium term, the ESG risk measure provides investors and fund managers with a useful metric for decision making.

Purpose: This paper aims to analyze the portfolio characteristics and the performance measures of sustainability-themed mutual funds, compared to ethical mutual funds that implement different sustainable and responsible investment strategies.Design/methodology/approach: The study refers to a European sample of 106 ethical funds and 51 sustainability-themed funds. The monthly performance of each fund is downloaded from Bloomberg for the period from January 1996 to December 2015. By applying a Fama and French (1993) three-factor model, the authors overcome the limits of a capital asset pricing model (CAPM) based-single index model, to compare the performance of the two categories of funds.Findings: Sustainability-themed funds do not differ significantly from ethical funds in terms of portfolio attributes, except for market capitalization, age and net asset value. Regarding performance measures, the results shows that sustainability-themed funds have a lower underperformance than ethical funds (as measured by Jensen’s alpha), whereas the samples do not differ in terms of market risk (as measured by Beta coefficient). The idiosyncratic risk of sustainability-themed funds is positively influenced by the specific portfolio strategies. The sustainability-themed funds show a higher concentration in the industrial sector and a lower exposure to financial sector than ethical funds; in terms of geographical strategy, they are more global and international oriented; they mainly focus on small caps and value stocks.Research limitations/implications: The different sustainable and responsible investment strategies can be applied simultaneously and in a growing number of possible combinations. Mutual fund managers can consider thematic approach as an efficient opportunity for reconciling financial performance and economic sustainability. It is demonstrated that sustainability-themed funds adopt a portfolio strategy significantly different from ethical funds and from the environmental, social and governance benchmarks. Mutual fund managers implement a thematic specialization without any negative impact on the funds returns compared to ethical funds; actually, with a proper diversified portfolio, they are able to reduce idiosyncratic risk.Originality/value: The analysis is extremely innovative, especially for the thematic sample. During the past 15 years, literature about sustainable and responsible investment has been focused especially on the differences in terms of risk and performance between socially responsible and conventional funds. This paper, starting from the methodology applied in these studies, wants to compare two different types of socially responsible strategies, with a specific focus on sustainability-themed mutual funds, given their exponential growth in the past few years.

The aim of the paper is to compare the risk-adjusted performance of sustainability-themed funds with other categories of mutual funds: sustainable and responsible mutual funds that implement different approaches in portfolio selection and management, and thematic funds not committed to responsible investments. The study analyses a sample of about 1000 European mutual open-end funds where 302 are sustainability-themed funds, 358 are other responsible funds, and 341 other thematic funds. Risk-adjusted performance is analyzed for the period 2007–2017 using different methodologies: a single factor Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), a Fama and French (1993) 3-factor model, and a Fama and French (2015) 5-factor model. Our main findings demonstrate that the risk-adjusted performance of ST funds is more closely related to their responsible nature than to their thematic approach. Sustainability-themed mutual funds are more similar to other socially responsible funds than to other thematic funds, as confirmed by performance analysis over time. They are also better than other thematic funds in overcoming financially turbulent periods and currently benefit from SRI regulation and disclosure.

This paper estimates the impact of public guarantees on crisis predictive indicators among small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs). We use a confidential database provided by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development on the universe of guarantees granted by the Central Guarantee Fund. We apply difference-in-difference regressions and propensity-score matching estimators to a sample of approximately 40,000 SMEs over the 2010–2018 period. We find that obtaining a public guarantee improves profitability both in the short- and medium-term. On the other hand, SMEs’ financial health worsens in the short run, but financial burdens are alleviated 2 years after the issuance of a guarantee. The economic and financial effects of government-backed loans are amplified for micro-sized firms, companies operating in the service sector and direct guarantees. Our results can thus support public authorities in designing credit guarantee schemes capable of preventing SMEs’ zombification and protecting them from the risk of debt overhang.