The ideal experiment to evaluate the impact of socially responsible investing on performance and fees would be to observe the same funds both with and without the SRI constraint. Most previous studies (Gregory et al., 1997; Statman, 2000; Kreander et al., 2005; Bauer et al., 2005) approximate the ideal experiment by comparing the performance of SRI funds to that of a control group of comparable conventional funds, a methodology that is known as matched-pair analysis. More precisely, each SRI fund is matched to one or several conventional funds with similar values of one or more matching variables. The difference between.
