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Sustainability is changing from a niche to a main component in financial analysis. Due to this change, sustainability receives more and more attention from academics. Despite the increasing number of studies, most authors focused on sustainable funds and sustainable indices, which makes a comparison difficult. Furthermore, the market has not found a consensus whether sustainability enables a significant excess return or not. Thus, this study concentrates on a different approach and uses sustainability ratings from a trusted sustainability research provider and constructed portfolios for the different sustainability ratings. Subsequently, a performance analysis was conducted by analyzing equity returns with a head-to-head analysis, the Jensen and the Fama and French model. The empirical study shows that sustainable portfolios outperformed the market, whereby not all results were significant. A significant number of environmental, social and governance studies are summarized at the end of this work to identify which factors could be responsible for the outperformance. This meta-approach shows arguments in favor of outperformance possibilities for all E, S and G criteria.

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Richard Boulanger holds a Master´s degree in Business Administration, with the focus on Financial Markets and Corporate Finance, from the University of Vienna. Nowadays, he is a Responsible Investment Analyst at Erste Asset Management. In addition he holds a lecture in the field of "Quantitative Methods" at the University of Vienna.

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