Proceedings of the Conference on Globalization and Its Discontents

There are variant findings regarding whether the foreign investors’ trading decisions have a significant impact on emerging markets’ future stock returns or whether their decisions are primarily driven by past returns. This study attempts to determine the bilateral interaction between foreign investors’ trading activity and returns in Turkish stock market by utilizing Granger-causality and OLS methodologies. The results gathered from VAR analysis imply a strong Granger-causality between foreign net portfolio inflows and stock returns in Turkish stock market. The results indicate that foreign investors follow a negative (contrarian) feedback strategy by buying (selling) past losers (winners). The results gathered from OLS analyses further support the VAR analysis findings indicating that, contemporaneously, there is a significant bilateral interaction between foreign portfolio inflows and stock returns reflecting the existence of price pressure effect and return chasing behavior in Turkish stock market. Overall, both analyses demonstrate that current and lagged stock returns are important determinants in foreign investors’ asset allocation strategies. Furthermore, the findings of this study reveal that foreign investors frequently change their positions on majority of the stocks in Turkish stock market which might basically stem from the absence of exit barriers in Turkish financial markets.

Performance Attributes of Environmental, Social, and Governance Exchange-Traded Funds

Recently, interest in socially responsible investing has grown, including new investment vehicles such as environmental, social, and governance exchange-traded funds (ESG ETFs). Despite their rising popularity, few studies have attempted to examine the performance characteristics of these stylized funds. This study aimed to fill this knowledge gap by elaborating on the performance attributes of ESG ETFs and examining fund managers’ security selection and market timing skills. Our results suggest that these funds generally underperform relative to conventional ETFs in many aspects. Additionally, the market timing skills of fund managers require improvement but are comparable to those of conventional ETFs. These results are robust to selecting the individual funds and alternative indices used in the sample. Furthermore, both the security selection and market timing skills of ESG ETF managers deteriorated significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the results indicate a slightly weaker cointegrated relationship between ESG ETFs and their benchmark indices when compared to conventional ETFs, suggesting that potential investors in ESG ETFs should carefully inspect the funds to make informed decisions