Do Ethical Companies Have High Stock Prices or High Returns?

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the performance of an impact investing strategy using the most ethical companies to build an impact investing portfolio. We test the time-series and cross-sectional returns of the impact portfolio, explore the financial analyst coverage of the most ethical firms, and run regressions to analyze the valuation of the most ethical firms. Our empirical results reveal that the portfolio consisting of the most ethical firms has a higher risk-adjusted return and that the most ethical firms have lower stock valuations than comparable stocks. We attribute our findings to the incomplete information in business ethics norms.