Døskeland and Pedersen (2018)

Døskeland, Trond, and Lars Jacob Tynes Pedersen. “Markets as Mirrors: The Effect of Moral Identity on Responsible Investment.” Working paper (NHH Norwegian School of Economics), 2018.

From the authors’ abstract: “Using a novel identification strategy, we investigate how identity concerns influence individual investor behavior. We construe the implementation of a responsible-investment labeling system as a natural experiment. In an experimental “shock”, the ethicality of investors’ (n=11,818) prior investments was revealed to them. This randomly assigned them into three groups with varying ethicality characteristics. Investors with predominantly ethical portfolios were more inclined to invest in green funds than those with less ethical portfolios.”