Seminar"Sustainable Finance Literacy and the Determinants of Sustainable Investing"

Presenter: Massimo Filippini, Dep. of Man­age­ment, Tech­no­logy, and Ec., En­ergy Sci­ence Cen­ter (ESC), ETH Zurich

Title: "Sustainable Finance Literacy and the Determinants of Sustainable Investing"

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the concept of sustainable finance literacy. We survey a large sample of Swiss households and measure financial, sustainability, and sustainable finance literacy using two complementary approaches. First, we use traditional multiple-choice questions, and second, a novel approach based on open-ended questions that ask respondents to write a text response. We find that Swiss households, which are generally highly financially literate by international standards, exhibit low levels of sustainable financial literacy. Interestingly, multiple-choice questions lead to a gender gap, with women performing worse than men. However, this difference disappears when open-ended questions are used. Moreover, despite its low level, knowledge about sustainable finance turns out to be a highly significant factor for the ownership of sustainable products. Therefore, our results show that there is an urgent need to create transparent regulatory standards and to strengthen information campaigns about sustainable financial products. 

Room Τ102 (Troias 2 & Spetson)