VoxEU Video Environment Finance and Fintech Financial Markets

Do people really want sustainable financial products?

Many consumers value sustainability when making choices about buying goods in their day-to-day lives. How can people transfer such values into financial as well material products? Interviewed at CEPR’s June 2022 Paris Symposium, Rob Bauer talks about his recent study on this topic. Measuring preferences regarding sustainability for clients of a Dutch pension fund, he finds that about 70% of the subjects interviewed during his field experiment are willing to have a more sustainable portfolio at the expense of a certain amount of financial return. But is this the only learning from this research?