Environmental and social preferences and investments in crypto-assets
Individuals invest in Environmental-Social-Governance (ESG)-assets not only because of (higher) expected returns but also driven by ethical and social considerations. Less is known about ESG-conscious investor subjective beliefs about crypto-assets and how these compare to traditional assets. Controversies surrounding the ESG footprint of certain crypto-asset classes – mainly on grounds of their energy-intensive crypto mining – offer a potentially informative object of inquiry. Leveraging a unique representative household finance survey for the Austrian population, we examine whether investors’ environmental and social preferences can explain cross-sectional differences in individual portfolio exposure to crypto-assets. We find a strong association between investors’ environmental and social preferences and the crypto-investment exposure but no significant relationship for the benchmarks of traditional asset classes such as bonds and shares.
CIAIAN Pavel;
CUPAK Andrej;
FESSLER Pirmin;
KANCS D'Artis;
2022-11-25
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC129919
978-92-76-58776-7 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 31284 EN,
OP KJ-NA-31-284-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC129919,
10.2760/832144 (online),
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