Ny undersøgelse bragt i The Review of Financial Studies konkluderer, at private investorer er villige til at betale for bæredygtige investeringer i form af nedsat afkast, men deres vilje til det er upåvirket af det miljømæssige bidrag selve investeringen har. Undersøgelsen viser, at investorernes villighed til at betale for bæredygtige investeringer ikke er forbundet med selve bidraget de har til miljøet, men den positive følelse af at investere bæredygtigt.
Undersøgelsen tager udgangspunkt i svar fra 500 private investorer.
Fra rapporten:
“We present evidence that investors’ willingness-to-pay for sustainable investments is largely independent of the impact of such investments. We arrive at this result for both experienced private investors and dedicated high-net-worth impact investors. The results replicate with a larger MTurk sample and for variations of the elicitation method. Being able to exclude a series of alternative explanations, we suggest that prosocial investors are best understood as warm-glow optimizers, who prefer investments that feel good, rather than as consequentialists, who derive utility from optimizing their impact.
Our findings have important implications for modeling investors’ prosocial preferences in asset pricing and for policy makers who want to harness the growing demand for sustainable investments in order to support efforts to achieve societal goals. Current theoretical models routinely assume prosocial investors to be consequentialists. Incorporating the importance of warm glow for decision-making might affect these models’ conclusions. For policy makers, our findings indicate a risk of greenwashing by providers of financial products and a potential equilibrium of “light green” products. This is particularly relevant against the backdrop of achieving internationally agreed upon sustainability goals, and given the fact that we observe our results even for experienced and dedicated impact investors.”
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