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...

Sustainable and responsible investing (SRI) is a strategy that seeks to combine both financial return and social good. The need to create and preserve SRI represents a key argument in investment decision-making, which leads other firms and investors to make strategic decisions beyond financial...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of a productive economy with negative externalities. Investors are not willing to accept lower returns than their best investment alternatives and entrepreneurs maximize profits. If capital markets are subject to a search friction, an ESG fund can...

Over the last years, the rise of sustainability and responsibility has drawn considerable attention by the entire society including businesses. Companies have integrated corporate social responsibility into their business model as a kind of self-regulation, and the way businesses invest has led...

We measure how shareholders value a firm's ethical actions via an experiment. Our findings are threefold. First, the "selfish investor hypothesis'' is strongly rejected. Participants are willing to pay $ .7 more for buying a share in a firm giving one more dollar per share to charities....

This paper analyzes socially responsible investment in the Walrasian model with uncertainty. It proves the following neutrality result: if each consumer's utility function with social responsibility is a function of her utility without social responsibility and asset holdings and if financial...

We propose a novel way of measuring the equity portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of a 13F institution (the “sustainability footprint”) and examine the relation between sustainability footprints and risk-adjusted investment performance. The analysis shows that 13F...