Efficiency of the Public Pensions Funds on the Socially Responsible Equities of Mexico

Abstract

In the present work, we test the mean-variance efficiency that Mexican public pension funds would have shown had these invested their local equity portfolio component only in socially responsible stocks. With a daily simulation (from 1 January 2005 to 31 July 2018) of the Standard & Poors (S&P) Mexico target risk indices, we found that there was no significant difference between the more conservative pension funds that invested only in the Price Index and Quotations (IPC) sustainable index against the ones that invested in the conventional IPC. In the case of the more aggressive type of pension funds (those with a higher Mexican equity investment level), a lower mean-variance efficiency would have been observed had these invested in the IPC sustainable index. We also found, with a two-regime Markov-switching analysis, that socially responsible investment would have been better for most of these pension funds during distress time periods. Even if our results do not give strong short-term proof for the use of a socially responsible investment strategy in the most aggressive pension funds, we found that the benefits will be observed in the long-term, due to a better performance during distress time periods and the lag effect of mid and small-cap stocks in the performance.