Comparison of the performance of Islamic, Sri and green mutual funds

Abstract

This paper measures and compares performance of Islamic, SRI and Green mutual equity funds worldwide in the period from 1 January 2001 to 31 December 2015. The sample consists of 611 mutual equity funds and their performance was assessed by using traditional risk-adjusted measures, namely Sharpe ratio, Modified Sharpe Ratio, Adjusted Sharpe Ratio, Treynor measure, Information ratio and Jensen’s alpha. The main findings show that Green mutual equity funds, on average, outperform both SRI and Islamic mutual equity funds over the entire observed period. SRI and Islamic mutual equity funds show similar performance, with a slight outperformance of SRI mutual fund for the majority of measures. Omission of the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008 and dot.com crisis in 2001 observations from the sample period reduces the differences in the performance between SRI and Islamic mutual equity funds. The Green mutual equity funds still remain the best performing ones. While there is an economic significance as presented in this thesis, there is no statistical significance as can be seen from t-test results.