Does a Greenium Exist in Indian Mutual Funds? Evidence from Equity and Debt Schemes (2015–2025)

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_10How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Greenium; ESG mutual funds; India; risk-adjusted performance; duration-adjusted spreads; sustainable investing; post-COVID

Abstract

Background: While the notion of a greenium—a pricing or performance differential tied to green labels—has been widely studied in bond markets, its presence within India’s mutual fund universe is far less documented. The post-COVID period brought rapid growth in ESG-branded schemes and stronger sustainability disclosures, providing a timely setting to test whether such a differential is detectable at the fund level.

Objective: To assess whether Indian mutual funds with explicit ESG/green mandates exhibit systematic differences in performance, risk, fee structures, and (for debt funds) portfolio yield characteristics when compared with carefully matched conventional funds.

Data&Methods: A five-year dataset (April 2020–March 2025) is built from publicly available AMFI NAV histories and AMC fact sheets. ESG equity schemes are matched to non-ESG peers by category and fund size; ESG/green debt funds are matched on duration and credit quality. We compute annualized returns, volatility, maximum drawdown, Sharpe and Sortino ratios, beta, and CAPM/Carhart alphas. For debt cohorts, portfolio yield-to-maturity, effective duration, and credit composition are analysed, and duration-adjusted yield spreads are constructed. Inference relies on two-sample tests, parsimonious panel regressions with fund fixed effects, and rolling-window diagnostics. All analyses are reproducible in Python and R.

Results: Without reporting estimates, the evidence indicates consistent cross-group differences between ESG-labelled funds and matched peers across equity and debt samples. Variations are observed in risk-adjusted profiles, fee patterns, and yield characteristics at comparable duration. The direction and magnitude of these gaps differ by asset class and across phases within the study window.

Originality&Value: This study offers one of the first integrated, post-COVID examinations of a potential fund-level greenium in India, spanning both equity and debt schemes and operationalizing the concept through returns, costs, and portfolio yields rather than a single indicator.

Limitations: The ESG fund set remains relatively small; bond portfolio granularity varies by disclosure; and evolving taxonomies may affect cross-fund comparability over time.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shubham Dhuriya
AU  - Prashant Singh
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/23
TI  - Does a Greenium Exist in Indian Mutual Funds? Evidence from Equity and Debt Schemes (2015–2025)
BT  - Proceedings of the Indo-Bhutan Social Science Conference 2025 (IBSSC 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 78
EP  - 100
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_10
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-561-4_10
ID  - Dhuriya2026
ER  -