Risk Management and Sustainability - A Study of Risk and Return in Portfolios With Different Levels of Sustainability

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines the risk profile of Electronically Traded Funds and the dependence of the ESG rating on risk. 527 ETFs with exposure globally were analyzed. Risk measures considered were Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall, while some other metrics of risk was used, such as the volatility, maximum drawdown, tail dependece, and copulas. Stress tests were conducted in order to test the resilience against market downturns. The ETFs were grouped by their ESG rating as well as by their carbon intensity. The results show that the lowest risk can be found for ETFs with either the lowest ESG rating or the highest. Generally, a higher ESG rating implies a lower risk, but without statistical significance in many cases. Further, ETFs with a higher ESG rating showed, on average, a lower maximum drawdown, a higher tail dependence, and more resilience in market downturns. Regarding volatility, the average was shown to be lower on average for ETFs with a higher ESG rating, but no statistical significance could be found. Interestingly, the results show that investing sustainably returns a better financial performance at a lower risk, thus going against the Capital Asset Pricing Model.