This paper analyzes the determinants of socially responsible investing (SRI) at the individual investor level. We examine data from an incentivized framed field experiment, which was part of a survey among a representative sample of financial decision makers in German households. Thus, we...

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...

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...

We exploit a modification to Sustainalytics' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating methodology, which is subsequently adopted by Morningstar, to study whether ESG ratings are salient for stock pricing. We show that the inversion of the rating scale but not new information leads some...

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...

More and more investors apply socially responsible screens when building their stock portfolios. This raises the question whether these investors can increase their performance by incorporating such screens into their investment process. To answer this question we implement a simple trading...

We test the frequently made claim that SRI funds are conventional funds in disguise. For this purpose, we compare the portfolio holdings of SRI funds to conventional funds concerning their social and environmental standards. Our empirical study of US equity funds shows that SRI funds have a...

This paper presents the results of an empirical study concerning conventional and socially responsible mutual funds.We apply a sophisticated operations research algorithm embedded in inverse portfolio optimization on financial market data, ESG-scores and CRSP fund data. Due to our results we...