Riedl and Smeets (2017)

Riedl, Arno, and Paul Smeets.  “Why Do Investors Hold Socially Responsible Mutual Funds?”  Working paper (Maastricht University), 2017.

Authors' abstract:  "To understand why investors hold  socially responsible (SRI) mutual funds, we use administrative data and link  them to survey responses and behavior in incentivized experiments.  We find that both social preferences and social  signaling are important factors for SRI decisions. Financial motives also play a role but appear to be of limited importance. Socially responsible investors in our sample expect to earn lower returns on SRI  than  on  conventional  funds and pay higher management fees.  This suggests that investors are willing to forgo financial performance  in  order to invest in accordance with their social preferences."

LK comment:  Won Moskowitz Prize Honorable Mention in 2017.

Link (working paper):  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2318987

Link (published version):  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.12547