IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jfinqa/v59y2024i2p435-473_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Sustainability Preferences Under Stress: Evidence from COVID-19

Author

Listed:
  • Döttling, Robin
  • Kim, Sehoon

Abstract

We document fragile demand for socially responsible investments (SRIs) by retail mutual fund investors. Using COVID-19 as an economic shock, we show funds with higher sustainability ratings experienced sharper declines in retail flows during the pandemic, controlling for fund characteristics. The decline in retail SRI fund flows is sharper than that of institutional flows, more pronounced when economies are hit harder by COVID-19, and unlikely to be driven by fund performance, past flows and size, or shifting investor attention. Corroborated by out-of-sample survey evidence, our findings highlight the high sensitivity of SRI demand by retail investors with respect to income shocks.

Suggested Citation

  • Döttling, Robin & Kim, Sehoon, 2024. "Sustainability Preferences Under Stress: Evidence from COVID-19," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 59(2), pages 435-473, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:jfinqa:v:59:y:2024:i:2:p:435-473_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022109022001296/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:jfinqa:v:59:y:2024:i:2:p:435-473_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/jfq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.