Empirical analysis reveals gender differences in investment choices, highlighting risk aversion and willingness to pay for cooperatives.
The analysis carried out in this work shows that sustainable investment decisions aimed at SDG 7 are mainly driven by objective financial attributes, especially the level of risk and the type of providing institution. The empirical analysis is based on 873 valid responses, balanced by gender and income levels, which enables us to capture heterogeneity in sustainable investment preferences. This study contributes to the literature by jointly examining personality traits and gender as explanatory factors of willingness to pay for investments aligned with SDG 7. In the general model, strong risk aversion—particularly to high risk—and a positive valuation of cooperatives stand out over factors such as explicit reference to SDG 7 or personality traits, which are not significant. Gender segmentation reveals substantial differences: women display a much higher risk aversion and a greater willingness to pay for investing in cooperatives and, to a lesser extent, in sustainable institutions; in this group, extraversion is negatively associated with the choice of SDG 7 funds. For men, risk remains key but with lower penalization, and provider type carries more moderate weight; no relevant link with personality traits is detected. Thus, the gender effect hypothesis is fully confirmed, while the personality hypothesis is partially supported. These results suggest that the design of sustainable financial products should be a WTP adapted to differentiate demographic and behavioral profiles in order to mobilize private capital toward the energy transition.
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Díaz-Caro et al. (2025) studied this question.
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