Fund Ratings of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) Funds: A Precautionary Note

We examine fund ratings of socially responsible investing (SRI) equity funds in emerging and developed markets by validating the assumptions of the equally weighted U.S. News mutual fund scorecard and the causal interrelations among its rating agencies-Morningstar, Lipper, Zacks, CFRA and TheStreet-for improvement priorities. In so doing, we apply a novel interdisciplinary methodology including cluster analysis, classification analysis, partial least squares structural equation modeling and importance performance analysis. We find evidence against the U.S. News assumptions, as individual rating agencies have unequal effects and exhibit the causal relationships among one another. We suggest emerging (developed) market fund managers allocate their resources-which are often limited-with the first priority to improving fund ratings of CFRA (Zacks), followed by Zacks (CFRA), TheStreet (Lipper), Lipper (Morningstar) and Morningstar (TheStreet). The positive causal relationships among rating agencies indicates that investors consider multiple rating agencies of the U.S. News for investment decisions, rather than simply use any single one of these rating agencies or their equally weighted aggregation. Interestingly, we find disagreement among rating agencies, with Zack (TheStreet) displaying rating deflation for emerging (developed) market funds. Disagreement among rating agencies may increase the monitoring effort of fund managers who usually "shop" for additional ratings in the hope of maximizing their average ratings.