Examining the behavior of renewable-energy fund investors

Mutual fund investors could contribute to sustainable development by encouraging fund managers to channel their savings into the funding of sustainable energy projects adopted by firms. This study examines whether renewable-energy investors take into account financial and/or nonfinancial factors when making the decision to invest in a specific fund, comparing their investment behavior with that of black-energy and conventional investors. To this end, we have gathered information about 4,368 mutual funds (76 renewable-energy funds, 109 black-energy funds, and 4,183 conventional mutual funds) from January 2007 to December 2017. For this sample, we adopt a panel-data approach with Petersen's standard errors clustered by fund and year. Our results indicate that renewable-energy fund investors are less sensitive to past financial performance than are black-energy and conventional fund investors, indicating that the former derive their utility from nonfinancial attributes whereas black-energy investors derive their utility from a conditional multiattribute and conventional fund investors derive their utility from financial attributes.