DJSSI – Dow Jones Sustainability Stock Index, ethical stock indexes, SRI (Socially Responsible Investing), performance of SRI funds,

This paper surveys risk management practices among Italian non-financial firms. This paper’s contribution lies in investigating derivative usage particular to Italian businesses, a groupwhose public disclosure of derivative instruments is not routine. Italy is characterised by a high percentage of small and medium sized family run\ud firms. The survey examines determinants of currency and interest rate derivative use with respect currency and to firm size, geographical location, rating, industry, access to capital markets and educated management. The results from the logistic regressions suggest that Italian non-financial firms’ use of derivative contracts is\ud strongly influenced by these characteristics

The increased scrutiny of investors regarding the non-financial aspects of corporate performance have placed portfolio managers in the position of having to weigh the benefits of "holding the market" against the cost of having positions in companies that are subsequently found to have questionable business practices. The availability of stock indexes based on sustainability screening makes increasingly viable for institutional investors the transition to a portfolio based on a Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) benchmark at relatively low cost. The increasing share of socially responsible investments may play a role in providing incentives towards a continuous upgrading of sustainability standards to the extent that their performance is not systematically inferior to that of the other funds. This paper examines whether these incentives have been so far detectable with particular reference to the Dow Jones Sustainability Stoxx Index (DJSSI) that focuses on the European corporations with the highest CSR scores among those included in the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, we analyse the performance of the DJSSI over the period 2001-2006 compared to that of the Surrogate Complementary Index (SCI), a new benchmark that includes only the components of the DJ Stoxx 600 that do not belong to the ethical index in order to evaluate more correctly the size of possible divergent performances.Second, we perform an event study on the same data set to analyse whether the stock market evaluation reacts to the inclusion (deletion) in the DJSSI. In both cases the results suggest that the evaluation of the CSR performance of a firm is a significant criterion for asset allocation activities.

This paper examines the transmission of information from German and the U.S. markets to domestic markets using daily price and volume data of 264 stocks from 26 countries that are traded in their home country and cross-listed outside their home market as depository receipts (DRs); in the German market as Global Depository Receipts (GDRs) and in the U.S. as American Depository Receipts (ADRs). We identify days with significant news arrivals in a market through minimum thresholds for both significant absolute price change and trading volume. DR returns and volatilities are affected by the shocks in the markets where they are cross-listed controlling for domestic shocks. Contemporaneous and/or lagged shocks to the cross-listed markets are transmitted to domestic stock returns and volatilities. South American DRs are affected mostly by U.S. shocks, while Eastern European DRs show greater reaction to the German shocks.

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