The Impact of Social Investing on Charitable Donations

Abstract

We examine the impact of social investing on charitable donations using a unique data set consisting of investment behaviors and donation transactions for more than 10,000 customers of an investment app platform. We find that investors switching to a recently introduced social fund reduced their donations, mainly in charities supporting causes similar to those of the social fund. However, 79% of the investors that switched to the social fund did not donate before switching, so the social fund attracted more people to fund social causes. Still, because of the substitution effect, we estimate social funds have a positive effect on society only if their annual contributions to social causes are greater than 3.2% of the balance invested. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, finance. Funding: This work was supported by the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research and the Jeremy Coller Foundation. Supplemental Material: Data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4339 .