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Purpose: Financial sustainability is underrepresented in both research on and the practice of sustainability management and reporting. In this article, we examine empirically how financially sustainable firms performed in the Corona crisis.Methods: We measure financial sustainability by four conditions: (1) firm growth, (2) the company’s ability to survive, (3) an acceptable overall level of earnings risk exposure, and (4) an attractive earnings risk profile. We apply this measurement to investment portfolios of a broad sample of firms from 15 European countries of the MSCI Europe using typical investment portfolio characteristics.Results: We find that financially sustainable firms outperform both the broad market and firms with low financial sustainability for the time span July 2019 to March 2020.Conclusion: An investment strategy that invests in financially sustainable firms seems to be better capable of overcoming economic breakdowns such as the Corona crisis. We find that the returns increase with each of the four conditions that are included in the investment strategy. This underlines that considering financial sustainability is interesting for financial management, corporate governance and management control.

This paper tests Ahmed and Safdar's noise‐related fundamentals‐based explanation for the momentum premium in European equity markets. Consistent with the view that past price changes may be partially driven by noise, the future return behaviour of winners and losers is significantly dependent upon the degree to which past price performance is consistent with fundamentals. European momentum profits are concentrated among those firms where past price performance is congruent with fundamentals, but absent among those firms where past price performance is incongruent with fundamentals. The significantly different momentum premiums on congruent and incongruent fundamentals‐momentum strategies are attributable to the exploitation of existing mispricing among momentum stocks that can be ex ante identified using firm fundamentals.

High-rated ESG (environmental, social, governance) firms do not outperform low-rated ESG firms in international markets. However, ESG-rated firms in general outperform unrated firms after controlling for firm size, book-to-market ratio, momentum, operating profitability, and investment. The following explanations are provided for these observations. First, though higher ESG ratings predict higher operating profitability and lower investments, these positive return-generating firm characteristics are not priced within the universe of ESG-rated firms, causing the insignificant return difference between high-rated and low-rated ESG firms. Second, the positive excess returns of ESG-rated firms over unrated firms reflect price corrections arising from the reversal of investors’ expectation errors concerning the impact of ESG characteristics on the firm’s future fundamental performance and are therefore the outcome of mispricing.

Internationally-investing Islamic equity funds from developed Islamic and non-Islamic markets perform in general similar to the market. However, analyzing different market conditions, we provide evidence that funds domiciled in Islamic markets outperform their peers and funds from non-Islamic markets during market turmoil, irrespective of the applied performance measurement model. We suggest that this outperformance is owed to the expertise of fund managers from developed Islamic markets who operate in a financial environment that is driven by Islamic principles. Our results are robust with respect to the standard Fama-French three-factor and four-factor models as well as to the novel five-factor model.

The positive cash-return relation, previously found in the USA, is similarly present in international Europe, Australasia, and the Far East (EAFE) markets over the sample period 1990–2016. Across the 20 developed non-U.S. equity markets, high-cash firms outperform low-cash firms on average by 4.2% per year after controlling for firm size, book-to-market, momentum, operating profitability, and investment. Though the observed cash premium varies with the firm’s level of debt, a rational risk-based pricing view falls short of fully understanding the effect. Instead, the observed cash premium reflects price corrections arising from the reversal of investors’ expectation errors concerning the impact of cash on the firm’s future performance and is therefore the outcome of mispricing.

The information about expected returns contained in the size, value, profitability, and investment factors of Fama and French’s five-factor model is rendered insignificant in the presence of a systematic misvaluation factor. A parsimonious two-factor model consisting of the market factor and a systematic misvaluation factor provides in general a similar description of average returns as the five-factor model.

This article tests Piotroski and So's (2012) market expectation errors approach to value-growth investing in European equity markets. As in the USA, European value-growth returns are concentrated among firms with existent market expectation errors, but absent among firms without such errors which can be ex ante identified by interacting book-to-market with FSCORE, an accounting-based measure of the firm's fundamental strength. The returns to an expectation errors-based value-growth strategy are highly persistent for up to three years after portfolio formation, pervasive among large firms, and cannot be explained by common risk factors. However, consistent with a mispricing-based interpretation, prior external financing activities significantly influence these market expectation errors. A financing-based misvaluation factor can explain the return behavior of value-growth strategies formed along market expectations errors.

Analyzing more than 200 internationally-investing sustainably screened funds, we find that socially responsible, green, and faith-based investments have to be considered as different approaches within the broader field of sustainable investing. While socially responsible and green funds tend to underperform in non-crisis markets, faith-based funds perform similar to the market and their conventional peers during any market state. We provide evidence that the funds’ specific screening activity significantly impacts the financial performance of sustainable investing vehicles in international markets. In particular, social screens lead to the underperformance of socially responsible funds, while energy screens drive the performance of green funds.

The positive relation between the firm’s net payout yield (NPY) and subsequent stock returns, previously found in the United States, is similarly present in foreign international equity markets. That is, firms with high net payout yields significantly outperform firms with low net payout yields. The observed return effect is robust to common controls, such as firm size, book-to-market and momentum, as well as to recently proposed controls for investment and operating profitability. Consistent with the changing payout behavior of firms around the world, the net payout yield holds more cross-sectional information for predicting subsequent stock returns than the traditional dividend yield.

This paper assumes the role of advocatus diaboli by testing whether an investment in sin stocks can financially outperform an investment in socially responsible stocks. We create a set of global, regional, and domestic portfolios consisting of a large number of stocks belonging to what could be labeled as a sextet of sin: adult entertainment, alcohol, gambling, nuclear power, tobacco, and weapons. We assess the performance of sin stocks against well-known benchmarks, and rerun the identical assessment for socially responsible stocks. We find no compelling evidence that sin stocks, or socially responsible stocks outperform or underperform, and establish this result in several ways. Consistent with this finding, a hedge portfolio long in sin stocks and short in socially responsible stocks does not outperform the market, either. However, sin stocks are substantially tilted towards value, bear less market risk with an average beta below one, and are prone to momentum relative to socially responsible stocks.

Nofsinger and Varma (2014) provide evidence that U.S. socially responsible funds outperform conventional funds during periods of market turmoil and, therefore, grant some crisis insurance. To investigate whether the U.S.-based evidence can be transferred to international markets, the authors analyze a comprehensive sample of internationally-investing socially responsible equity funds in a period from 2000 to 2012. As abnormal returns are model-specific, the authors apply standard and q-theory based performance measurement models. At first glance, the authors observe no crisis protection for internationally-investing socially responsible funds. However, splitting their sample in funds domiciled in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific to account for biases due to the origin of a fund, the authors find that socially responsible funds from North America outperform their peers in crisis periods irrespective of the applied performance evaluation model. The authors suggest that the U.S.-based evidence is restricted to internationally-investing funds domiciled in North America, and discover that this outperformance seems to be owed to the stock-picking abilities of North American fund managers and their advantage due to the nature of the North American market. Keywords: socially responsible investments, mutual funds, international markets, performance evaluation, managerial abilities. JEL Classification: G11, G12, G15, G23, M14