The purpose of this study is to contribute to our understanding of the relationship of environmental and social attitudes of investors and their investment into crypto-assets compared to traditional assets. Given the controversies over the environmental footprint of some crypto-asset classes, primarily due to energy-intensive mining, they present an intriguing subject for investigation. Leveraging a unique household finance survey representative of the Austrian population, we examine whether environmental and social attitudes can elucidate the variance in individual portfolio exposure to crypto-assets. Results indicate a robust link between investors’ environmental and social attitudes and their exposure to crypto-investments, yet no significant association was found with traditional asset benchmarks like bonds and shares.Pavel Ciaian, Andrej Cupak, Pirmin Fessler & d’Artis Kancs (2024) Environmental and social attitudes and investments in crypto-assets, Applied Economics, DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2023.2297742
As a benchmark, we compare the crypto-asset holding probabilities with holding probabilities of traditional risky assets, namely bonds and shares in Table 2. While the estimated relationship between E&S attitudes and crypto holdings is statistically significant in most estimated models, we do not find such a statistically significant relationship between E&S attitudes and the probability to hold bonds or shares (see columns 14 in Table 2 compared to columns 58 and 912). OLS estimates in Tables 4 and 5 confirm these findings. This result finds strong support in the recent empirical literature on the ESG investing. For example, Anderson and Robinson (2022) have not found any statistically significant relationship between individuals ESG attitudes and ownership of pro-environment portfolios (green bonds, stocks, and pension funds) in a sample of Swedish households. For our estimations, which are based on the AFLS data that do not identify separately E&S bonds/stocks and non-E&S assets
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APPLIED ECONOMICS 11 Table 5. Results on E&S attitudes for shares (OLS). Attitudes for enviro. issues (E) Attitudes for social issues (S1) (M1) (M2) (M3) 0.012 (0.010) -0.000 (0.010) (M4) 0.011 (0.010) (M5) 0.012 (0.011) -0.003 (0.011) (M6) 0.012 (0.010) Attitudes for social issues (S2) 0.016 (0.012) 0.013 (0.013) E&S1 0.006 (0.009) E&S2 Objective fin. literacy Confidence in own fin. knowledge Risk attitude score Secondary education Tertiary education Individual monthly income Gender: female Age Constant
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Regional fixed effects R2 N Wald test on E=S p-value 0.016* (0.009) 0.019 (0.012) 0.128*** (0.018) 0.042 (0.030) 0.092* (0.055) 0.000*** (0.000) 0.011 (0.020) 0.002*** (0.001) -0.538*** (0.077) YES 0.212 903 0.012 (0.009) 0.016** (0.008) 0.022** (0.011) 0.127*** (0.017) 0.027 (0.026) 0.062 (0.050) 0.000*** (0.000) -0.005 (0.019) 0.002*** (0.001) -0.538*** (0.072) YES 0.205 1,000 0.131*** (0.018) 0.058** (0.029) 0.121** (0.052) 0.000*** (0.000) 0.001 (0.021) 0.002*** (0.001) -0.418*** (0.065) NO 0.198 915 0.930 0.335 0.130*** (0.017) 0.047* (0.024) 0.093** (0.047) 0.000*** (0.000) -0.013 (0.019) 0.002*** (0.001) -0.433*** (0.069) NO 0.189 1,016 0.145 0.703 0.017** (0.009) 0.019 (0.012) 0.128*** (0.018) 0.042 (0.029) 0.093* (0.054) 0.000*** (0.000) 0.011 (0.020) 0.002*** (0.001) -0.532*** (0.077) YES 0.213 903 1.432 0.232
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