IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/finana/v97y2025ics1057521924006860.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Responsible investing: Upside potential and downside protection?

Author

Listed:
  • Gao, Yumeng
  • Hoepner, Andreas G.F.
  • Prokopczuk, Marcel
  • Rouxelin, Florent
  • Wuersig, Christoph

Abstract

Conventional risk proxies are measured assuming that investors have symmetric risk preferences, with upside and downside deviations from the expectation being equivalently undesirable. Responsible investors, however, have dual financial aims of enhancing upside potential while reducing downside risk by actively incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) aspects into the investment process. We utilize a non-symmetric option pricing research design to test whether responsible investors could live up to their ambitions. We find that those who are simply Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) members do not deliver the desirable asymmetric performance, while financial firms with highly rated responsible investment processes can actually achieve both aims for their own shareholders: enhancing upside potentials and protecting themselves from downside risks.

Suggested Citation

  • Gao, Yumeng & Hoepner, Andreas G.F. & Prokopczuk, Marcel & Rouxelin, Florent & Wuersig, Christoph, 2025. "Responsible investing: Upside potential and downside protection?," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:finana:v:97:y:2025:i:c:s1057521924006860
    DOI: 10.1016/j.irfa.2024.103754
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521924006860
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.irfa.2024.103754?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Responsible investing; ESG opportunity and risk; Option implied volatility; Upside potential; Downside risk; Investing objective; Institutional investor;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:finana:v:97:y:2025:i:c:s1057521924006860. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620166 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.