‘Profit with purpose’: Shaping young investors' socially responsible investment behavior through financial literacy and subjective norms

The values-driven young investors' financial decisions are behaviorally anchored and explains their socially responsible investment intentions (SRI intentions). These young investors integrate environment, peer groups and financial knowledge to analyse the SRI performance and then arrive at investment decisions. Financial literacy (FL) and subjective norms (SN) play a catalytic role in attaining cognitive consistency as youngsters seek alignment in their beliefs and actions. Additionally, theory of planned behavior explains the enhanced intention to invest in socially responsible investment (SRI) options given the perceived control over knowledge about their performance (perceived SRI performance). This advances the understanding of integration of SDG 12. The study explores how FL moderates the SRI investment intentions of young investors through perceived SRI performance and subjective norms. Multistage sampling technique was applied to identify respondents and data was collected in 2 waves. Utilizing PLS-SEM through SmartPLS 4.0 on data from 563 young investors, the structural model was analysed for higher-order analysis. The model explains 52.2% variation and moderated-mediation analysis reveals the twist in the model. The study recommends the financial institutions and policymakers about developing financial wisdom in the young investors to make them more vigilant about their SRI decisions by harnessing the psychological support from peer groups.