Socially responsible investing (SRI) seeks to combine financial returns with social and environmental performance. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, SRI is seen as an alternative way to maintain sustainable returns. This article attempts to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the performance of socially responsible stocks. In other words, we test the resilience of ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) oriented companies’ stock prices to the global crisis, and compare it with the performance of selected non-ESG stocks. To do so, we focus on companies listed on the Moroccan, the Egyptian and the Turkish stock exchanges. We use the event study methodology, which relies mainly on calculating the daily abnormal returns of each company and aggregating them over an event window to test their statistical significance. The results reveal that all the companies listed on these three stock exchanges suffered from the COVID-19 crisis, posting negative abnormal returns. However, the ESG oriented companies listed on the Turkish stock exchange were more resilient compared to non-ESG companies. Sustainable investing underperformed non-ESG investing in Morocco and Egypt, as ESG oriented companies posted more pronounced negative abnormal returns, compare to non-ESG companies. So, unlike Turkey, ESG oriented companies were less portfolio protective alternative during the crisis in Morocco and Egypt.

The history of global health crises has been aggravated by the spread of the new coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19), which caused disruptions in the economic and financial systems of the various countries, particularly the financial markets. This paper examines the impact of the spread of the pandemic, in the Moroccan context, on its financial market from February 24, 2020 to May 5, 2020. We use the day of the outbreak of the state of health emergency in Morocco, March 16, 2020, as the day of the event. In order to evaluate the reaction of the prices of companies listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange, we use the event study methodology which is based mainly on the calculation of the daily abnormal returns of each company, and cumulate them over an event window in order to test their statistical significance. Our conclusions confirm the negative influence of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Moroccan financial market. We find that the market reactions are more important on short event windows, especially on the days surrounding the date of the event, while the reaction is less important on long event windows.

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) is one of the main theories related to financial markets. This hypothesis is based on the idea that stock prices already reflect all available market information. In its weak form, the EMH states that future prices cannot be predicted by analyzing historical asset prices. This paper aims to test the effectiveness of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indices in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA) and compare them with their conventional counterparts. The sample data covers the period from September 27 2018 to December 23 2021 in daily frequency. Our empirical approach is based on Hurst behavior using the R/S statistic. The results reject the market efficiency hypothesis for both ESG and conventional indices and show that these indices are significantly inefficient with persistent returns. In terms of the level of efficiency between the ESG and conventional indices, the study does not indicate significant differences.

ESG values are always at the heart of investors' concerns. Several studies have shown that company prices react to the publication of sustainability information. The objective of this work is to synthesize the existing empirical literature that evaluates the impact of additions/deletions of companies in a socially responsible index on their financial performance. The study was conducted on a number of 43 papers selected following a number of inclusion criteria over the period from 2010 to 2021. The papers were retrieved from widely recognized international databases, organized in Mendeley and transferred to NVIVO for textual analysis. We pursued this according to the methodological protocol proposed by Okoli (2015). The results of the systemic review prove that the majority of the studies confirmed the existence of a positive (negative) significant impact following the inclusion (exclusion) announcements.