The link between corporate sustainability and willingness to invest: new evidence from the field of ethical investments

Volker Lingnau (), Florian Fuchs () and Florian Beham ()
Additional contact information
Volker Lingnau: University of Kaiserslautern
Florian Fuchs: University of Kaiserslautern
Florian Beham: University of Kaiserslautern

Journal of Management Control: Zeitschrift für Planung und Unternehmenssteuerung, 2022, vol. 33, issue 3, No 2, 335-369

Abstract: Abstract In recent decades, academia has addressed a wide range of research topics in the field of ethical decision-making. Besides a great amount of research on ethical consumption, also the domain of ethical investments increasingly moves in the focus of scholars. While in this area most research focuses on whether socially or environmentally sustainable businesses outperform traditional investments financially or investigates the character traits as well as other socio-demographic factors of ethical investors, the impact of sustainable corporate conduct on the investment intentions of private investors still requires further research. Hence, we conducted two studies to shed more light on this highly relevant topic. After discussing the current state of research, in our first empirical study, we explore whether besides the traditional triad of risk, return, and liquidity, also sustainability exerts a significant impact on the willingness to invest. As hypothesized, we find that sustainability shows a clear and decisive impact in addition to the traditional factors. In a consecutive study, we investigate deeper into the sustainability-willingness to invest link. Here, our results show that improved sustainability might not pay off in terms of investment attractiveness, however and conversely, it certainly harms to conduct business in a non-sustainable manner, which cannot even be compensated by an increased return.

Keywords: Sustainability management; Business ethics; Ethical investment; Empirical study; Factorial survey; Willingness to invest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00187-022-00340-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jmgtco:v:33:y:2022:i:3:d:10.1007_s00187-022-00340-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/187

DOI: 10.1007/s00187-022-00340-z

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Management Control: Zeitschrift für Planung und Unternehmenssteuerung is currently edited by Thomas Günther

More articles in Journal of Management Control: Zeitschrift für Planung und Unternehmenssteuerung from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().