Risk Modeling of Sustainable Mutual Funds Using GARCH Time Series

Sammanfattning: The demand for sustainable investments has seen an increase in recent years. There is considerable literature covering backtesting of the performance and risk of socially responsible investments (SRI) compared to conventional investments. However, literature that models and examines the risk characteristics of SRI compared to conventional investments is limited. This thesis seeks to model and compare the risk of mutual funds scoring in the top 10% in terms of sustainability, based on Morningstar Portfolio Sustainability Score, to those scoring in the bottom 10%. We create one portfolio consisting of the top 10% funds and one portfolio consisting of the bottom 10%, for European and global mutual funds separately, thus in total creating 4 portfolios. The analysis is based on data of the funds' returns and Morningstar Portfolio Sustainability Scores during December 2015 to August 2019. Investigating several GARCH models, we find an ARMA-GARCH model with skewed Student's t-distribution as innovation distribution to give the best fit to the daily log-returns of each portfolio. Based on the fitted ARMA-GARCH models with skewed Student's t-distribution, we use a parametric bootstrap method to compute 95% confidence intervals for the difference in long-run volatility and value at risk (VaR) between the portfolios with high and low Morningstar Portfolio Sustainability Scores. This is performed on the portfolios of European and global funds separately. We conclude that, for global and European funds respectively, no significant difference in terms of long-run volatility and VaR is found between the funds in each of the 10% ends of the Morningstar Portfolio Sustainability Score.