This paper investigates the Chicago Board Option Exchange Volatility Index's (‘VIX’) response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, in terms of information efficiency. First, we estimate an Efficiency Index over rolling windows, based on closing levels, for a period between 1995-01-03 and 2020-12-30. Second, we check for the presence of deterministic chaos in efficiency series, by using the largest Lyapunov exponent and sample, as well as permutation entropy. However, we do not find that these estimators provide a clear evidence of a substantial change in VIX's efficiency during 2020, in terms of deterministic chaos and irregular dynamics.

The definition and scope of sustainability have evolved over the years, stimulated by debates which have won the attention of investors, thereby creating concepts such as responsible investment, socially responsible investment, responsible finance, etc. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate whether screening has an effect on the financial performance of mutual funds and whether these effects are positive or negative. The study mainly focuses on the U.S. market as it is well developed and therefore provides greater insight and value. The research method uses the Markowitz and Sharpe market models to determine the market value of SRI and non SRI mutual funds. The study also depicts the investors’ attitude towards embedding sustainability driven variables in the decision making process as well as the market response to socially responsible investments.

The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted all aspects of social and economic life, including the evolution of stock markets. Thus, we advance a methodological framework suitable for assessing 2020 year-long shifts in markets’ statistical complexity, and we apply such framework to ten major international developed or emerging stock markets. Our research reveals that this crisis had considerably altered markets’ evolutionary patterns. The network description of markets’ multivocal transmission of complex responses changed in 2020, European and Asian markets playing a pivotal role. Nevertheless, an important regional and time heterogeneity emerges. In addition, we find that the total number of worldwide confirmed COVID-19 cases plays a leading role in the changes in markets’ complexity.

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The last decades brought to stock market investors’ attention several key issues regarding companies’ activity, besides the financial statements. These issues, such as environmental, social, or corporate governance policies are nowadays included in integrated reports issued by many listed companies worldwide. Although these topics seem to currently attract a high interest in the media, our study’s aim is to determine whether the listed firms’ release of Integrated Reports has any bearing on the issuers’ performance on the capital market as assessed by market value, return, and risk. In this respect, we analysed three different stock market time series’ reactions – daily close prices, daily logarithmic returns, and risk measured by the Expected Shortfall – to the publication of integrated reports, for a sample of 48 companies, listed on various European stock markets. In order to identify any sudden changes in the analysed time series behaviour, immediately after the publication date, we used the Bai-Perron multiple structural breaks test. Our results show that no consistent, significant reactions occur within the analysed time series immediately after the publication of integrated reports, but only isolated, circumstantial reactions seem to appear. Moreover, it seems that the markets show common significant reactions to certain events, marked by major structural breaks, but none of these events could be related to the publication of integrated reports. Within this context, our paper manages to prove that although it currently constitutes a hot topic worldwide, integrated reporting is not a key feature in the investors’ short-term decisionmaking process.