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| Can Fund's Green Portfolio Management Get Additional Support of Market Capital? Identifying the Dual Objectives of Fund Investors |
| HU Jinyan, XU Mingyu
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School of Economics, Shandong University;
School of Economics, Qingdao University |
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Abstract With the growing awareness of environmental responsibility among investors, as a professional financial institution, public funds have become an important vehicle for social capital to participate in green investment. However, public funds still face theoretical and practical obstacles in the process of helping green investment and financing, and improving the green financial system. If the two factors of fund financial performance and environmental performance are not included in the empirical model, it is impossible to identify the dual investment goals of green fund investors to pursue both financial and environmental returns. Especially for China's fund market, there is little direct evidence that investors will pursue the environmental performance brought by green investment, and the above problems have hindered the practice of green investment and financing, market supervision and guidance, and further academic research. Clarifying the above issues is not only helpful for current investor guidance and fund operation, but can also promote long-term corporate green transformation, sustainable economic development, and ethical and social responsibility practice.
Based on data on China's active public offering of funds obtained from Wind, CSMAR, and other databases, this paper measures the environmental performance of funds as a non-financial performance indicator by referring to different green enterprise measurement standards. On this basis, we incorporate environmental performance indicators into the fund performance-flow relationship model, and find that both fund financial performance and environmental performance will significantly increase fund net inflow. In order to test the robustness of the model, this paper adjusts several technical processes of environmental and financial performance indicators, and takes measures such as controlling more factors and excluding samples that may introduce confounding effects, and finds that the main conclusions remain robust. In other words, this paper obtains consistent research conclusions in different indicators, models, and samples, especially in different defining methods of green enterprises.
Further research shows that both institutional and individual investors have the following characteristics. Green fund investors have a higher degree of positive reaction to environmental performance. The fund's holding of green stocks has no significant impact on its financial performance. In addition, investors of funds with lower financial performance rankings, smaller size, and more recent establishment are more responsive to environmental performance.
The conclusions of this paper have implications for investor guidance, enterprise green information disclosure, fund operation guidance, and other aspects. First, in terms of investor guidance, improving investors' awareness of environmental protection and social responsibility can guide more social funds to invest in funds with better environmental performance. Second, strengthening corporate green information disclosure and establishing a unified green enterprise evaluation standard can help investors more accurately evaluate the environmental benefits of fund investment. Third, in the fund portfolio management and follow-up supervision, guiding funds to effectively screen and actively increase their holdings of green stocks can help improve their capital inflow. In particular, for green funds, implementing green investment principles and striving to improve environmental performance should become their rational choice.
The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, for the study of the impact of non-financial factors on capital flow, this paper directly incorporates the non-financial performance factor of environmental performance into the model, thus providing more targeted and robust empirical evidence. Second, in the context of controversial green stock screening standards, this paper comprehensively uses a variety of different standards to quantitatively evaluate the environmental performance of funds and obtains consistent conclusions among different indicators. Third, this paper provides the latest empirical evidence for the existing debate on the impact of green investment of funds on fund performance. Fourth, this paper further expands the empirical evidence of fund investors' pursuit of fund environmental performance by screening samples based on prospectus information and analyzing the heterogeneity of fund financial performance ranking.
If the subsequent disclosure frequency of fund position information can be improved, the data frequency can be refined from quarterly to monthly. Exploring the differences in the relationship between environmental performance and capital flows between funds in different countries and their determinants is also valuable for future research.
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Received: 19 June 2024
Published: 13 October 2025
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