Do Investors Value Sustainability? A Natural Experiment Examining Ranking and Fund Flows
Examining a shock to the salience of the sustainability of the U.S. mutual fund market, we present causal evidence that investors marketwide value sustainability: being categorized as low sustainability resulted in net outflows of more than $12 billion while being categorized as high sustainability...
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| Published in: | The Journal of finance (New York) Vol. 74; no. 6; pp. 2789 - 2837 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Journal Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Cambridge
Wiley Periodicals, Inc
01.12.2019
Blackwell Publishers Inc |
| Subjects: | |
| ISSN: | 0022-1082, 1540-6261 |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Examining a shock to the salience of the sustainability of the U.S. mutual fund market, we present causal evidence that investors marketwide value sustainability: being categorized as low sustainability resulted in net outflows of more than $12 billion while being categorized as high sustainability led to net inflows of more than $24 billion. Experimental evidence suggests that sustainability is viewed as positively predicting future performance, but we do not find evidence that high-sustainability funds outperform low-sustainability funds. The evidence is consistent with positive affect influencing expectations of sustainable fund performance and nonpecuniary motives influencing investment decisions. |
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| Bibliography: | s Submission Guidelines and Conflict of Interest Disclosure Policy. Journal of Finance Samuel M. Hartzmark and Abigail B. Sussman are with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. We are grateful to Jonathan Berk, Anat Bracha, Alex Edmans, Max Farrell, Mariassunta Giannetti, Matti Keloharju, Karl Lins, Vikas Mehrotra, Sanjog Misra, Giovanna Nicodano, Jacopo Ponticelli, Antonino Rizzo, Brad Shapiro, David Solomon, Kelly Shue, Paul Smeets, Oleg Urminksy, and Eric Zwick, as well as to seminar participants at Aalto, Emory, Cambridge, Chicago Booth, Warwick, London School of Economics, Imperial College, Northwestern, Bernstein Quantitative Finance Conference, Boulder Summer Conference on Financial Decision Making, UVA Darden Symposium on Mutual Funds and ETFs, Harvard Global Corporate Governance Colloquia, Development Bank of Japan Conference, Texas Finance Festival, European Finance Association Conference, Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance Conference, Swedish House of Finance Conference on Sustainable Finance, and Research Affiliates Investment Research Retreat for comments. We thank Halley Bayer, Nicholas Herzog, and Nathaniel Posner for excellent research assistance. We thank Ray Sin, Steve Wendel, and Sara Newcomb at Morningstar for providing the data. This work is supported by the True North Communications, Inc. Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Sussman is a member of the Morningstar Behavioral Science Advisory Board. The authors have nothing further to disclose with respect to the ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 14 |
| ISSN: | 0022-1082 1540-6261 |
| DOI: | 10.1111/jofi.12841 |