The Journey of Discovering the European Landscape of Passive Index Investing: A Cross-Country Horse Race

Sammanfattning: The European financial markets have witnessed two erupting trends in the last decade: passive index investing and sustainable investing. This research builds a unique data set that maps out the capital flows toward passive index investments over the last decade for six European countries. Continuing, we build a data set for the capital flows towards sustainable index investments on an aggregated European level. As such, we examine country-specific trends, as well as investment trends for Europe as a whole. We discuss the trajectory of each country and find complex growth patterns that may be explained by investor sentiment, economic cycles, and regulations. This research gives a preliminary snapshot of the growing and quickly evolving landscape of passive index investing.