Sustainable Finance: Who includes sustainability in their investment decisions?
- Type:Bachelor/Master Thesis
- Date:assigned
- Supervisor:
Motivation
The fight against climate change is in dire need of additional capital to reach the internationally defined climate targets. Since public funds are not enough to stem the transition towards a more sustainable economy, private capital needs to be mobilized and directed towards sustainable companies and projects as well. This is the basic premise of sustainable finance and sustainable investing in particular. While these fields have garnered significant attention in recent years, the invested volumes are still far from enough. While there already exist a number of studies on why investors might include sustainability as a factor in their investment decision, it would also be interesting to find out who these investors or people are who do (or do not) take sustainability into account when investing their money, in terms of demographics, political attitudes and similar. This could uncover potential pathways to not only move existing investors towards sustainable investments, but maybe also to incentivize people to start investing (sustainably) in the stock market.
Objectives
The goal of this thesis is to use our SOSEC (https://www.socialsentiment.org/) data set to find differences between people who do and do not take sustainability into account when investing and between investors and non-investors. Furthermore, time series could be taken into consideration to investigate whether there are changes over time, and whether those are a general trend or are influenced by certain events or macroeconomic factors.
Prerequisites
This will be a quantitative study, thus you should have progamming skills (preferably python), or a strong motivation to self-learn it quickly. Interest and some experience in social sciences would be helpful. Proactiveness and high level of independence would also be favourable.
References
IPCC. (2022). Sixth Assessment Report - Mitigation of Climate Change.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGIII_FullReport.pdf
Giglio, S., Maggiori, M., Stroebel, J., Tan, Z., Utkus, S., Xu, X., & Xu Vanguard, X. (2023). Four Facts About ESG Beliefs and Investor Portfolios.
Amel-Zadeh, A., & Serafeim, G. (2018). Why and how investors use ESG information: Evidence from a global survey. Financial Analysts Journal, 74(3), 87–103. https://doi.org/10.2469/faj.v74.n3.2