Financial literacy and green investment: Do green households hold green investments?

Counter intuitively perhaps, but recent research shows that green households aren’t more likely to hold environmentally friendly investment portfolios. This Misum Academic Insight reveals the contributing factors to this conundrum and how one of the solutions could be to put the task of gathering and processing ESG-related information into the hands of advisors and fund managers, rather than leaving this to individual shareholders.

This Academic Insight is based on the research article “Financial Literacy in the Age of Green Investment” published in 2021 in the journal Review of Finance.

The study looks at the connection between environmental attitudes and why they do not translate to stock holdings and portfolio holdings in the Swedish pension system. Read the Academic Insight here.

On December 15, Anders presented the findings on a panel titled "Do pro-environment households make greener investments?" hosted by Swedish think tank, SNS and the Swedish House of Finance. You can watch or listen to Anders in a video or podcast in here (in Swedish).

Authors:

Anders Anderson, Misum Affiliated Researcher with the Sustainable Finance Initiative, Research Fellow and Senior Advisor to the Swedish House of Finance.

David T. Robinson, The James and Gail Vander Weide Professor of Finance, Fuqua School of Business at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and a Erling Persson, Visiting Professor at SSE, Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.