Article published December 9, 2021 and Video recorded on January 19, 2022
Acting as a responsible financial institution is a founding pillar of Amundi’s corporate strategy. This is demonstrated not only through our pledge to make ESG investing standard throughout our whole product range, but also through our commitment to ESG research in order to fully understand the responsible investment landscape.
This paper marks the latest update in our series exploring the impact of ESG investment on asset pricing in stock markets. The previous papers*, covering the periods 2010-2019, found that:
- ESG investing tended to penalize both passive and active ESG investors between 2010 and 2013.
- In contrast, ESG investing was a source of outperformance from 2014 to 2017 in Europe and North America, and was even becoming a beta strategy in the Eurozone.
- More recently the trends between North America and the Eurozone have somewhat diverged with ESG performance in North America lagging the sustained advances made in the Eurozone.
- In 2018-2019, a move became apparent from bestin-class selection policies to the implementation of more active strategies to integrate a dynamic view of ESG scores.
- The social pillar came to the fore in 2018-2019 after lagging from 2014-2017, likely due to growing concern for social themes such as rising inequalities.