【主题】Sustainability Preferences: The Role of Beliefs and Ambiguity Attitudes
【报告人】教沛然（副教授，荷兰马斯特里赫特大学）
【时间】2024年5月20日周一14:00-15:30
【地点】经济学院701会议室
【语言】英文
【主持人】黄振兴（教授，上海财经大学经济学院微观经济学系）
【摘要】Trillions of dollars flow into socially responsible investments (SRIs), yet it is unclear how investors trade off sustainability with financial performance. To formally evaluate this, we need a reliable method to elicit investors' belief towards the financial performance of SRI, which is still lacking in the literature. In this paper, we formally investigate investors' expectations towards funds' financial performances associated with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) labels through an incentivized field survey experiment that compares three different belief elicitation methods, two incentivized and one unincentivized. Our findings from both incentivized methods suggest that knowledge of a fund's high ESG rating on average positively influences return expectations. This is in contrast to the same group of participants' answers to the commonly used unincentivized Likert scale question. Furthermore, return expectations towards high ESG funds elicited by the incentivized methods are positively correlated with allocation to sustainable funds in an incentivized allocation task. This implies that unincentivized methods of eliciting ESG-related beliefs may be systematically biased. Additionally, we also document some influence of ambiguity attitudes on investors’ perception of sustainable assets. Our research contributes to understanding investors' motive for engaging in SRI, and practically dissecting sustainability preferences.
【报告人简介】Dr. Peiran Jiao is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Department of Finance, School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University (UM). He is also an Associated Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Associated Member of the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS), Research Fellow of the Network for Studies on Pensions, Aging and Retirement (Netspar), and Director of the Maastricht University Behavioral Insights Centre (UM-BIC). Before joining UM, Dr. Jiao was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Economics and Nuffield College, University of Oxford from 2014 to 2017. He obtained his PhD degree in Economics from Claremont Graduate University (CA, USA) in 2014. His research mainly focuses on behavioral and experimental finance/economics. His research papers are at the intersection of a number of disciplines, such as economics, finance, psychology and neuroscience, with a mixture of theoretical, empirical and experimental approaches. He currently focuses on three topics: (1) experience and memory-based learning; (2) information processing and limited attention; (3) biases in belief formation and updating. His papers have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Management Science, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Brain Research, Nature Scientific Reports, Cortex, etc. His projects have been funded by the NWO (Dutch Science Council) Vidi grant, the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, the John Fell Fund, Harvard University Foundations of Human Behavior Grant, INQUIRE Europe research grant, etc.
