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Following the traditions of stakeholder salience theory, this paper aims to contend that some institutional investor activists and tactics have more power, legitimacy and urgency than others.

The author undertakes an empirical test of a saliency table looking at the effects of institutional investor heterogeneity on portfolio firm responses using ordinal logistic regression.

This study found heterogeneity for institutional investor type to drive firm responses but not tactic type raising the importance of the attributes of each type of investor activist. The author found a rank ordering of public pension plans, hedge funds and then private multiemployer funds in saliency to portfolio firms. In addition, the use of proxy-based tactics did not help or hurt each investor type. Both findings challenge prior empirical work.

The rank ordering based upon the heterogeneity of institutional investor activists and their tactical interactions are tested providing empirical evidence of the most influential activist investors and tactics in one study, which is rare in the literature.

Using data spanning 145 years for Sweden, the authors investigate the benefits of holding multi-family properties for investors who aim to hedge wage growth.

The authors assess the risk-adjusted excess return that results from adding multi-family properties to a mixed-asset portfolio that aims to track wage growth. The authors also analyse the macroeconomic determinants of asset returns. Finally, the authors test whether a causal relationship exists between the growth rate of real wages and that of real net operating income.

The benefits from holding multi-family properties are the greatest for low-risk allocation approaches. For more risky strategies, the role of real estate is more muted, and it varies greatly over time. Holding real estate was most beneficial during the first two decades of the 21st century. Multi-family properties are found to be the only asset class to be positively related to wage growth. The authors show that the net operating income acts as the transmission channel between wages and property returns.

The paper assesses whether the growing interest of pension funds for multi-family properties is warranted in the context of a portfolio that aims to track wage growth.

Using long term data makes it possible to use a rolling windows approach and hence to consider multiple outcomes for an allocation strategy over a typical investment horizon. This permits to assess the dispersion of performance across several periods rather than just one as is commonly done in the literature. The results show that the conclusions that would be drawn from looking at the past two or three decades of data differ substantially from those for earlier time periods.

In order to mitigate the effects of climate change, the UK government has set a target of achieving net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050. Agricultural GHG emissions in 2017 were 45.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e; 10% of UK total GHG emissions). Farmland hedgerows are a carbon sink, storing carbon in the vegetation and soils beneath them, and thus increasing hedgerow length by 40% has been proposed in the UK to help meet net zero targets. However, the full impact of this expansion on farm biodiversity is yet to be evaluated in a net zero context. This paper critically synthesises the literature on the biodiversity implications of hedgerow planting and management on arable farms in the UK as a rapid review with policy recommendations. Eight peer-reviewed articles were reviewed, with the overall scientific evidence suggesting a positive influence of hedgerow management on farmland biodiversity, particularly coppicing and hedgelaying, although other boundary features, e.g. field margins and green lanes, may be additive to net zero hedgerow policy as they often supported higher abundances and richness of species. Only one paper found hedgerow age effects on biodiversity, with no significant effects found. Key policy implications are that further research is required, particularly on the effect of hedgerow age on biodiversity, as well as mammalian and avian responses to hedgerow planting and management, in order to fully evaluate hedgerow expansion impacts on biodiversity.

The aim of the paper is to investigate the risk-hedging and/or safe haven properties of environmental, social and governance (ESG) index during the COVID-19 in China.

This paper employs the DCC, VCC, CCC as well as Newey–West estimator regression.

The findings provide empirical evidence of the risk hedging properties of ESG indexes as well as of the environmental, social and governance thematic indexes during the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. The results also support the superior risk hedging properties of ESG indexes over cryptocurrency. However, the authors do not find any safe haven properties of ESG, Bitcoin, gold and West Texas Intermediate (WTI).

The paper offers therefore, practical policy implications for asset managers, central bankers and investors suggesting the pandemic risk-hedging opportunities of ESG investments.

The study represents one of the first empirical contributions examining safe-haven and hedging properties of ESG indexes compared to traditional and innovative safe haven assets, during the eruption of the COVID-19 crisis.

This paper compares the benefits of direct international real estate investments in a mixed asset portfolio from the perspective of a passive investor with high and low bond allocation.

Due to high data availability and its professionalism, the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund was used as a representative example. Real estate indices from 8 countries were used for the portfolio analysis. The data were desmoothed according to Geltners’s 1993 approach.

The optimal real estate ratio in the present case is around 20–55%. However, this is strongly dependent on the bond ratio of the multi-asset portfolio. Portfolios with a high equity ratio benefit more from the additional direct real estate investments than portfolios with high bond ratios.

A rebalancing of individual stocks and bonds was not analysed. Only indexes from MSCI (Morgan Stanley Capital International) were available.

Concludes that the weighting of stocks and bonds has a strong influence on the optimal real estate ratio and therefore structural changes that affect this weighting.

The originality of the paper lies in the analysis with different weights of stocks and bonds, the consideration of 8 real estate markets and the observation period. The results of the work highlight areas of interest for further research.

This study aims to conduct an empirical investigation to assess the hedge, diversifier and safe-haven properties of different environmental, social and governance (ESG) assets (i.e. green bonds and ESG equity index) vis-à-vis conventional investments (namely, equity index, gold and commodities).

The authors examine the sample period 2007–2021 using the bivariate cross-quantilogram (CQG) analysis and a dynamic conditional correlation (DCC) multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) experiment with several extensions.

The evidence shows that the analyzed ESG investments exhibit mainly diversifying features depending on the asset class taken as a reference, with some potential hedging/safe-haven qualities (for the green bond) in peculiar timespans. Therefore, the results suggest that investors might consider sustainable investing as a new measure of risk reduction, which has interesting implications for both portfolio allocation and policy design.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first that empirically investigates at once the dependence between different ESG investments (i.e. equity and green bond) with different conventional investments such as gold, equity and commodity market indices over a large sample period (2007–2021). Well-suited methodologies like the bivariate CQG and the DCC multivariate GARCH are used to capture the spillover effect and the hedging/diversifying nature, even in temporary contexts. Finally, a global perspective is used.