Socially responsible investors pursue financial as well as nonfinancial goals. Whereas the role of financial criteria in investment decisions is well understood, much less is known on the influence of social responsibility considerations. This work seeks to integrate both dimensions within a data envelopment analysis framework consistent with second‐order stochastic dominance efficiency. We compare the performance of conventional versus socially responsible mutual funds on an empirical data set. Our data do not support the conjecture that conventional mutual funds exhibit superior overall performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The study of vulnerability constitutes a central axis in research work on sustainability. Social vulnerability (SV) analyzes differences in human capacity to prepare, respond and recover from the impact of a natural hazard. Although disasters threaten all the people who suffer from them, they do not affect all members of society in the same way. Social and economic inequalities make certain groups more vulnerable. Factors such as age, sex, social class and ethnic identity increase vulnerability to a natural disaster. Ten years after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, this work deepens the relationship between natural disasters, SV and gender, exploring the unequal distribution of the SV in the face of a seismic risk. The source of statistical information has been obtained from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), developed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Multicriteria decision techniques (TOPSIS) and the differences in differences (DID) technique are used to analyze variations in gender inequality in SV as a result of the catastrophic event. The results obtained reinforce the idea of the negative impact of the disaster on the SV. Additionally, an intensification of the negative effects is observed when the household is headed by a woman, increasing the gap in SV between households headed by women and the rest of the households. The conclusions obtained show additional evidence of the negative effects caused by natural disasters on women, and important implications for disaster risk management are derived that should not be ignored.

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García-Melón, M.; Pérez Gladish, BM.; Gómez-Navarro, T.; Méndez Rodriguez, P. (2016). Assessing mutual funds' corporate social responsibility: a multistakeholder-AHP based methodology. Annals of Operations Research. 244(2):475-503. doi:10.1007/s10479-016-2132-5. 1Running head: SRI multi-stakeholders ranking 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 AbstractThere are an increasing number of individual or corporate investors who demand Social Responsibility (SR) to a financial asset. Social responsibility is a multi-dimensional concept that requires identifying a number of criteria and their weights to be assessed in a financial asset. Currently a varied discussion is held among practitioners and academics with respect to this question. The common practice is to equally weight all the social responsibility criteria. However, investors may wish to prioritize a particular dimension depending on their preferences. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to tackle this issue, e.g. to provide different weights for the different SR criteria according to the opinion of different stakeholders. These weights are later used in order to build a composite measure of social responsibility and to rank mutual funds.To that end, Vigeo's list of social responsibility criteria is taken as the starting point for discussion. The Equitics® database gives the information for the companies' social responsibility performance according to those criteria. Stakeholders are selected according to various proposals and the Analytic Hierarchy Process is applied to weighting the Vigeo's criteria according to the stakeholders' preferences. The methodology allows not only assessing the financial assets but also tracking their evolution with the periodic Equitics® database updates.To prove the feasibility and utility of the methodology, a case study analysing Spanish equity mutual funds has been carried out. Among other results, the method shows that the so-called "responsible" funds do not perform particularly well in the social responsibility assessment. Besides, we have found that there are few mutual funds with a good balance between financial and social responsibility behaviour.

OBJECTIVE Analyze the contextual and individual characteristics that explain the differences in the induced abortion rate, temporally and territorially.METHODS We conducted an econometric analysis with panel data of the influence of public investment in health and per capita income on induced abortion as well as a measurement of the effect of social and economic factors related to the labor market and reproduction: female employment, immigration, adolescent fertility and marriage rate. The empirical exercise was conducted with a sample of 22 countries in Europe for the 2001-2009 period.RESULTS The great territorial variability of induced abortion was the result of contextual and individual socioeconomic factors. Higher levels of national income and investments in public health reduce its incidence. The following sociodemographic characteristics were also significant regressors of induced abortion: female employment, civil status, migration, and adolescent fertility.CONCLUSIONS Induced abortion responds to sociodemographic patterns, in which the characteristics of each country are essential. The individual and contextual socioeconomic inequalities impact significantly on its incidence. Further research on the relationship between economic growth, labor market, institutions and social norms is required to better understand its transnational variability and to reduce its incidence.