Socially Responsible Investments in Europe Performance analysis between an SRI and conventional portfolio.

Sustainable investments have become an important part of the financial world, particularly in Europe, over the past few years. Europe is indeed a very attractive market for socially responsible investment (SRI). The market for sustainable funds domiciled there represents almost EUR 2 trillion in assets by the end of 2021 which was approximately 16% of the total European fund market and a 70% increase compared to 2020. New European regulations allows responsible investments to gain importance and credibility. The objective of this thesis is to compare the performance of SRI funds with convectional funds in Europe and see how they both reacted to the COVID crisis. To do so, we constructed an SRI and a conventional portfolio of 20 funds each on a 12-year period (between 2010 and 2022) and selected 2 indexes (MSCI EUROPE & MSCI EUROPE SRI). Our analysis, based on performance indicators, models and ratios, reveals that there is no significant difference between the performance of the selected SRI and conventional funds.