Performance of the Socially Responsible Investment During the Global Crisis

There has been lately a big discussion about the causes of the current financial crisis. Many authors claim that financial markets and investments desperately need innovations. Socially responsible investment is one of such innovations, which has recently attracted great interest The basic idea of socially responsible investment investing only into the companies which fulfill some normative criteria - is actually nothing new, but is has been rapidly growing during the last decade. This paper is concentrated on the performance of such investments. According to the traditional portfolio theory, the SRI should perform worse or at best the same as the conventional Indices. Nevertheless, there are also opinions proclaiming the superiority of the SRI. These opinions are based on the idea that the socially responsible behavior is a sign of the well-managed company, which Is therefore supposed to keep its performance In the future more likely than the 'irresponsible" enterprises. Many researches have been conducted to solve this controversy. First part of this paper therefore contains brief overview of the methodology and results of these studies. These researches are not up to date enough, though. Because of the huge change of economic situation caused by the global crisis, in our opinion it is necessary to make new analysis of the performance of the SRI under the current conditions. In this paper we analyzed the risk-adjusted return of the SRI stock market indices in comparison with the standard ones. Obtained results are consistent with most of the previous studies, I. e. no statistically significant difference between the SRI and conventional investments was found.