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Pension funds try to account for sustainable development in their operations. This mainly translates in responsible investing. We investigate how this interacts with the financial objectives. We use a survey among more than 250 pension funds based in 15 European countries. Multinomial logistic regression is used to find out how pension funds trade off sustainable development and financial objectives. Our findings suggest that pension funds that have not included responsibility in their strategy and investments have a clear priority for financial performance, whereas pension funds who integrate sustainable development in their strategy can bring balance between finance and responsibility.

We found that pension funds may face a bottleneck as practical impediments to engaging in responsible investment with respect to the role played by defining and implementing responsible investment. Furthermore, pension funds seek additional coherence and practical guidelines in this field to enable them to take into account ethical considerations in their investment strategies and in implementing them. These findings indicate that the availability of information may affect the stance that key decision makers of pension funds adopt towards responsible investment.

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