The impact of sustainable finance literacy on investment decisions

This paper examines the effects of an educational program on Sustainable Finance Literacy (SFL) and its influence on sustainable investment decisions. Through a randomized controlled trial and an incentivized choice experiment, we found that our SFL program significantly improves literacy. The program also increased the probability of investing in a highly sustainable fund by 6 percentage points on the extensive margin and decreased allocations between 3.2% and 2.7% for the less sustainable funds on the intensive margin. Among participants who already held pro-sustainability attitudes, the treatment additionally led to more investments in the highly sustainable fund on the intensive margin. Higher SFL further led to more critical sustainability assessments of mid-tier funds and reduced tendencies to chase past high returns.