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As times move on with unprecedented climate change and much related environmental issues, the world's financial domain is slowly but surely shifting towards sustainability. The following research addresses knowledge and preferences towards sustainable finance among master's students with an economic background. The research concentrates on assessing students' understanding of sustainable finance concepts, evaluating their willingness to invest in sustainable investments over traditional ones, and analyzing the influence of personal values versus financial returns on their investment decisions. Data was collected by surveying master's students in different economic, business, and management programs. A majority of master’s students knew well what sustainable finance is, including familiarity with ESG, EU taxonomy, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In general, they consider investing in sustainable finance and are willing to pay higher fees for sustainability funds over non-sustainable ones. Personal values, rather than the expected financial returns, were the driving force behind investment preferences for the students. This research holds meaning in increasing sustainable finance literacy among the younger generation, who will feature in the shaping of economic landscapes across the globe. The evaluation of the involvement and perceptions of master's students in sustainable investments contributes to a large, growing body of literature that aims at integrating sustainability into education and financial decision-making processes, with the ultimate goal of giving the next generation the wherewithal to drive transition to the sustainable global economy.

Sustainable Investment --- ESG --- Sustainable Finance --- Financial Literacy --- Master's Students --- Investment Preferences --- Youth Investment Behavior --- Survey-based Study --- Environmental Awareness --- Social Impact --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Finance

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The present research aims to provide a comprehensive analysis and comparison of residential real estate investments and stock investment, for the private individual investor. This work’s geographic focus is the European Union with a special focus on Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy and Spain.
Unleveraged returns for both types of investments were computed by using the historical data of a diversified stock index, the price/rent ratio in various cities, and the historical housing price appreciation in different E.U. countries. It was found that unleveraged stock returns were more attractive than unleveraged residential real estate returns.
Leveraged returns were then analyzed. It was shown that a residential mortgage is often a better mean of leverage for the individual investor than a margin account and leveraged residential real estate returns surpassed leveraged stock returns.
In the second part of this paper, different particularities that could affect one’s investment vehicle choice were reviewed. Stock investment proved to be more liquid and passive, taxation was very investor-dependent, and ethical forms of investments exist for both investment vehicles.
For the investor focused primarily on obtaining the highest return possible, investing in leveraged residential real estate properties was recommended. For the investor who is more interested in an investment’s liquidity and passivity, stock securities were recommended. Other factors affecting one’s investment vehicle decision were also discussed.

investment vehicle --- real estate --- stocks --- returns --- comparison --- leverage --- taxation --- liquidity --- ethics --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Finance

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Nowadays, technology and innovation are more and more present in our daily lives. With the increasing use of mobiles and e-commerce, we are experiencing a new digital revolution. The sector of the economy that is most affected by this advance is the financial sector, which has seen an unprecedented increase in the number of Fintechs during the past few years.
It has never been easier to make banking or financial operations or transactions online and even directly on our smartphones. Whether it is making payments over the internet through payment services providers (PSP), or investing money through tools such as robo-advisors, these online platforms are now considered to be more efficient, faster and less costly than humans.
Therefore, the following questions arise : Since they offer different but complementary services, why can’t we link these platforms to improve their respective businesses and make life easier for the customers ? How to invest in the financial markets through a robo-advisor the sleeping money of individuals, PSP users ? How do Paypal, the online payment pioneer, and Acorns, a well-known American robo-advisor, do business together ?
To answer these questions, the study, based on a series of interviews with professionals from the sector in Luxembourg, focuses on the European classification of PSP into three types of licenses (payment institutions, electronic money institutions, credit institutions or bank). Considering the two first separated from the third in terms of strategy and by taking into account the conditions for obtaining the different licenses as set out in the law, it proposes various partnership insights for each of them, in accordance with the needs of any robo- advisor.

Online Payment – Robo-advisor – Fintech – Automation – License – Partnership – Innovation – Bank – Wealth Management – Sleeping Money --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Finance

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In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in analyzing the impact of information contained in news articles on financial markets. The reaction effect of stock markets to the news’ underlying sentiment has been demonstrated in the literature. This thesis aims at measuring with statistical means if attention is a driving element for sentiment to impact the stock market more consistently. 
A Panel Vector Autoregression analysis over the year 2016 on the constituents of the S&P 100 is conducted to assess this impact. I use indirect and direct proxies of attention combined with sentiment found in news, to create an interaction measure. The results show that a one-week lagged impact of sentiment on abnormal return is greater whenever attention is high. These are consistent with the conceptual assumption that attention is needed for any type of information to influence stock markets and has quantitatively been proven in this work.

sentiment --- attention --- news --- VAR --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Finance

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The global aim of this thesis is to verify whether sustainability constitutes a relevant factor in capturing the variation of stock returns through a quantitative analysis. In order to check the validity of our hypothesis, which is that sustainability does indeed capture variation of stocks returns, the Fama and French Five-factor model has been adapted to a 6-factor model, adding a sustainability factor to the other validated factors, which are size, value, profitability and investment. 

Sustainability is clearly a hot topic in present times, as a world trend has been increasing over the past year in a worldwide bench of different sectors, including finance. Here, we analyze the history of sustainability in finance, going through relating topics such as ESG, ethics, corporate social responsibility and responsible investments in finance, since they have also encountered an importance growth in business. Sustainability clearly plays a role in today’s business world, which is why it is worth to analyzing if it also plays a role in capturing stock return variations.

The data used in this paper comes from the Thompsons Reuters Database. The sample has been created from all the NYSE stocks having an ESG score, which had the key figure of sustainability level for a corporation and which also correspond to our sample filtration. The sample we examine extends from January 2003 to December 2017, and is therefore composed of 180 months of data. 

The methodology used in our portfolio and factor construction is the same as that employed by Fama and French. The results consequently helped us compare whether sustainability of a corporation was worthy of consideration while investing in their stocks, for an investor who seeks to maximize his return for a given level of risk, or minimize his risk for a given level of return. 

Our findings concluded that even if a difference of returns does exist between stocks considered sustainable and unsustainable, our sustainable factor could not significantly help to capture return variations. The results of this paper can, indeed, be ameliorated over time as sustainability is a growing trend which may well lead to more significant result in the future and also provide wider sample of data.

Sustainable Investing, Fama & French, CSR, SRI, ESG, CAPM --- Sciences économiques & de gestion > Finance