In this article, we examine how investor motives affect investment behavior in equity crowdfunding. In particular, we compare the investment behavior of sustainability-oriented with ordinary crowd investors on six leading equity crowdfunding platforms in Austria and Germany and investigate...

In recent years, impact investors - private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns - have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the non-financial characteristics...

Retail investors are an essential group in shaping the effects of ESG investing and ESG assets under management are growing at an exponential rate. This study of retail investors' demand generates first evidence on their ESG-relevant decisions. In general, ESG was regarded as a highly...

This study uses security-level investor demand and dynamic pricing information in the primary bond market to examine investor tastes for ESG assets and their pricing effects. We find that green bonds are significantly more oversubscribed than their conventional counterparts offered by the same...

I study portfolio sustainability and capital flow dynamics in socially responsible and conventional mutual funds. I document that a large fraction of conventional funds systematically invests sustainably even without a social mandate, while several socially responsible funds persistently...

We structurally estimate a model in which agents' information processing biases can cause predictability in firms' asset returns and investment inefficiencies. We generalize the neoclassical investment model by allowing for two biases -- overconfidence and over-extrapolation of trends -- that...

We survey clients of a German online bank to study retail investors' beliefs about the autocorrelation of annual returns of the aggregate stock market, and the role of these beliefs in financial decisions. A majority of our respondents believe in mean reversion of aggregate returns, and these...

Private investors are an increasingly important voice in sustainability challenges. We examine investors' attitudes and behavior towards sustainable investing through a survey of 5,030 Finnish private investors. We document that 60 percent of all respondents consider environmental, social, and...

I analyze risk and return dynamics of sustainable investments with a focus on investor demand. I find that demand for green stocks in comparison with brown stocks is higher and led by active institutional investors especially during the last quinquennium. Predictive regressions show that one...

In this paper I investigate the investment behavior of SRI investors based on SRI mutual fund flows. Specifically, I analyze how SRI investors react to past performance and ethical standards. This empirical study shows that over the years along with the development of the SRI fund market, the...