Eliciting pension beneficiaries’ sustainability preferences: Netspar Design Paper 207

Pension funds are under social and political pressure to make their investment policies more sustainable. Furthermore, European legislation will increasingly require pension funds to explicitly measure participants’ preferences for sustainability in their investment policies. However, do pension fund participants prefer sustainable investments and do they want a say in how the fund does that? We assessed this by conducting two field experiments in which a Dutch pension fund gave its participants a real voice in its policy to advance sustainable investment.