IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-01221108.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Altruism or profit maximising? Motivations of the demand for extra financial information

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Heimann
  • Katia Lobre

    (Laboratoire de Recherche Magellan - UJML - Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3 - Université de Lyon - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises (IAE) - Lyon)

Abstract

Drawing on altruism literature and studies on socially responsible investment (SRI) we explore graduate students' altruist and profit motivation to consider extra financial information in a stock investment game. We follow a fully mixed concurrent equal status design. We rely on qualitative analysis of unstructured reports about the stock selection process to infer the set of motivations underlying ESG integration. Quantitative modelling allows for assessing whether motivation to integrate ESG analysis also results in more responsible investments by regressing the weights of top tier ESG companies in portfolios on motivation frequencies expressed in the reports. To evaluate contextual and more stable factors, we also include financial performance of portfolios in the regression analysis. We find that motivation induced by the expectation of a financial advantage is the main driver of ESG integration. The effect of financial motivation for ESG integration on ESG investments, however, is moderated by the financial performance in the following way: Investors who declared integrating ESG values for financial performance only had a greater share of top tier ESG companies in their portfolios when their portfolios underperformed the market. This result confirms and extends previous findings on SRI investor behaviour in down markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Heimann & Katia Lobre, 2015. "Altruism or profit maximising? Motivations of the demand for extra financial information," Post-Print hal-01221108, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01221108
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:hal:journl:hal-01221108. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.