The Demography of Socially Responsible Investors across Countries and Time: A Systematic Review

Abstract

The field of investment has received considerable changes in recent years. Over the past decade one of the major trends in the finance domain is the emergence of Socially Responsible Investments, reflecting the increasing awareness of investors to social and environmental and corporate governance issues. Over the past three decades many surveys have been conducted to understand and segment the demographic profile of socially responsible investors. This article aims to provide an overview of the existing literature on the demographic characteristics of socially responsible investors that has been studied across countries and time .We have limited our focus to insights generated by the articles specifically, dealing with relative influence of socio-demographic factors on the attitude towards Socially Responsible Investment, as opposed to broadening the scope of our inquiry to a larger set of studies related to the SRI such as fund performance, financial risk/return characteristics etc. The articles published have been classified into four broad demographic categories viz. Age, Gender, Education and Income on the basis of the importance of each category in context of Socially Responsible Investment. Finally the conclusion and future research directions are suggested which would be of importance for both academicians and investment world.

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

“…These results are also in line with Dorfleitner and Nguyen ( 2016 ) who emphasize that female and younger investors seek to invest a higher proportion in socially responsible investments. However, reviewing the influence of socio-demographic factors in the SRI literature, the results are not consistent (Siddiqui, 2018 ). For instance, and in contrast to the results aforementioned, examining the investment behavior of 1000 investors, Lewis and Mackenzie ( 2000a ) find that SRIs are not a single phenomenon of younger and wealthier investors but can be linked to middle-aged people with average income as well.…”