Does Demography & Socio-Economic Status Inuence Investment Motives?

Research studies in the past have analyzed the signicance of demographic and socioeconomic status inuencing investment preference and behavior. However, no study has focused on analyzing their impact on ‘Investment motives’. Hence, this study examines the investment motives and analyzes the signicance of the impact of demographic and socioeconomic factors on investment motives. The study uses factor analysis and Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) for this purpose. The data are collected from 753 investors through a structured questionnaire. Results of the study show that investment motives are grouped into six categories i.e., nature of the investment, future nancial needs, investor characteristics, safety and stability, investor behavior, and investor options. Further, there exists a main effect of employment, marital status, location, and the number of earning members on investment motives. Likewise, there exists an interaction effect of age and location, gender and income, and age and income on investment motives. The study adds to the existing literature by comprehensively analyzing all the demographic, socioeconomic status with the investment motives.


Introduction
Investors widely differ in investment motives. This is primarily due to the inherent heterogeneity in the demographic and socio-economic factors like gender, age, employment, education, marital status, income, and other related socio-economic aspects like family and earning members (Campell 2006;Curcuru et al. 2009). Research studies in the past have examined the impact of demographic and socioeconomic status on 'Investment preference' (Sha 2014;Sarkar & Sahu 2018). Likewise, research studies have individually analyzed the impact of demographic variables like age (Maheswari & Mittla 2017), gender (Jamil & Khan 2016), education (Fachrudin KR & Fachrudin KA 2016), marital status (Lyons, Neelakantan & Scherpf 2008), and income (Bairagi & Chakraborty 2018) on investment preference. However, no study has been found to the knowledge of the researcher that examines the impact of demographic and socio-economic factors on investment motives. Hence this study adds to the existing literature by comprehensively analyzing the impact of demographic and socio-economic factors on investment motives. Investors' demographic, socio-economic information, and the level of importance towards various investment objectives are collected through a structured questionnaire. The collected data regarding the level of importance towards various investment objectives are then analyzed using factor analysis, to aggregate it as related investment motives. Further, the aggregated investment motives are then analyzed using Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to examine for any main effect as well interaction effect of demographic and socioeconomic factors exist on the investment motives.
The paper is divided into the following sections. Section 2 discusses literature review and hypothesis development. Section 3 about research methodology. Section 4 discusses the results of the analysis and section 5 concludes with the ndings of the study.

Literature Review & Hypotheses Development Investment Motives
A research study by Bhuvaneswari (2012) found that liquidity, risk, and return on investment are the primary motives of investors. Likewise, Shukla (2016) found that investors give signi cant importance to future security. Further, investment avenue-related aspects like safety and security, periodic returns, time frame, capital gain are also considered to be very important (Harikanth & Pragathi 2012;Parmalganthi & Kumar 2015). Likewise, tax bene ts are also considered important (Srividya 2009;Vijayakumar 2015).
Further, a research study by Riyazahmed and Saravanaraj (2016) found that behavioral aspects like herd mentality and mental accounting signi cantly in uences investment preference. Personality-related aspects like self-belief, con dence in managing an investment, knowledge about an investment also play a crucial role (Jiang, Peng & Yan 2020 Eckel andGrossmen (2008), andCroson andGneezy (2009) found that women are risk-averse than men while choosing an investment. In contrast to this, Save (2012) found that the overall gender difference in risky investments is insigni cant. Furthermore, Bajtelsmit and Bernasek (2001) add that risk aversion increases between men and women with increasing age.
Contrastingly, Aren and Aydemir (2015) found that age and marital status have no impact on investment preference. Collard (2009) found a signi cant impact of age and claims that investors nearing the retirement period prefer less risk while choosing an investment avenue. Likewise, Bajtelsmit and Bernasek (2001) found an increase in income level reduces risk aversion among investors. Kristjanpollar and Olson (2014) found that risk-taking decreases with age and increases with income level. Furthermore, Halko et al. (2012), Arona et al (2010), and Rooij et al (2011 found that marital status and its interaction with gender have a signi cant in uence on investment preference. On the other hand, few research studies have found that marital status does not signi cantly affect investment preference (Rooij et al 2011;Halko et al 2012). Likewise, Dwyer et al. (2002) found that age has a signi cant in uence on investment choice, while aged investors reduce risky investments like equity.
A research study by Mathanika et al. (2017) found that age, marital status, and monthly income have signi cant in uence whereas gender and the educational level do not have a signi cant in uence on investment preference. Like investment preference, few research studies have examined 'Investor risk tolerance'. Subramanian and Athiyaman (2016) analyzed the impact of demographic factors on risk tolerance and found that age, education, past investment experience, and income have a signi cant in uence on risk tolerance and gender, occupation does not have signi cant in uence. Further, Das and Jain (2014) add that gender and occupation are the most in uential factors on the objectives of the investment. Poh and Yuen (2007) found that income, investment experience, and self-perceived skills have a signi cant in uence on 'Investor behavior'. Chandra (2017) found that gender, age, education, income, and investment level determine 'Investor behavior', and marital status and occupation are found to be insigni cant. Besides, quite a few research studies have found the signi cance of speci c demographic factors such as risk-seeking (Barber & Odean 2001;Barber & Odean 2008), longevity (Mas & Rull 2014), income premium (Light 2004) to be signi cant in uencers on investor behavior.
It is observed from the past literature that demographic and socio-economic factors have a signi cant in uence on investment decisions concerning preference and behavior. However, no research work examined the level of impact on 'Investment motive'. Hence, in this study factors like gender, employment, education, age, marital status, family type, location, ownership of the residence, family size, earning members and income level are considered to examine the level of in uence on the investment motives. Further, the interaction effect of demographic and socioeconomic variables is also tested to examine the signi cance in in uencing investment motives.
The following hypotheses are framed for the analysis purpose : H 01 : There is no signi cant main effect of demographic and socioeconomic variables on each of the investment motives.
H 02 : There is no two-way interaction effect among demographic and socioeconomic variables on each of the investment motives.

Methodology
A Structured questionnaire is used to collect responses from 753 investors during the year 2020. The rst section of the questionnaire consists of demographic information i.e., Gender, employment, education, age, marital status, location, and residence. The next section about the socio-economic status i.e., monthly income, earning members, family type, and family size. The third section collected the level of importance that investors give towards twenty-ve investment objectives (Table A1) on a six-point scale (1 Strongly disagree to 5 Strongly agree).

Results & Discussions
Demographic pro le Many of the investors considered for the study are educated male, private employees aged between 26 to 55. Nearly 82% of them are married and live in the urban area. Further, the investors belong to a nuclear family with 4 members and 1 earning member with an average income ranging from ₹10000 to ₹30000 (Table 1).
Hence, the respondents' pro le best represents a standard demographic and socio-economic scenario of investors in the Indian context (Bloom, 2011;Securities Exchange Board of India, 2016

Importance to investment objectives
The mean level of importance given by investors towards various investment objectives shows that investors give higher importance to the "safety of investments". Further, the least importance is given towards "consideration of the connection between investment options -mental accounting". Besides analyzing the investment objectives and group them as common investment motives, factor analysis is performed. Factor analysis reduces the collected data into a few underlying dimensions. To reduce the dimensions of the investment objectives, principal component analysis is performed. The initial analysis with all the twenty-ve objectives resulted in a Measure of Sampling Adequacy of .846, which indicates that factor analysis can be applied to the collected data. Only six factors have eigenvalues greater than1. Hence, the six investment motives i.e., nature of the investment, future nancial needs, investor characteristics, safety and stability, investor behavior, investor options are aggregated through factor analysis (Table 3). Investors signi cantly differ in the level of importance given to various investment motives. Hence, the mean level of importance expressed by the investors on each of the six factors, viz. Nature of investment, Future nancial needs, Investors' Characteristics, Safety and Stability of investments, Investors' behavior aspects, and Investors' options were tested for equality among each demographic and socioeconomic variable taken for study. MANOVA is used to examine the effect of one or more independent variables on multiple dependent variables (Allen 2017).
Further, the research questions examined through MANOVA are: 1) Is there any main effect of the independent variables (demographic and socio-economic factors) on dependent variables (investment motives)?
2) Is there any interaction effect among the independent variables (demographic and socio-economic factors) on dependent variables (investment motives)?
The results on testing both the interaction and main effects show that there are signi cant main effects of Employment, Marital status, Location, and Number of earning members on investment motives.
Likewise, the interaction effect between Age*Location, Gender*Income, and Age*Income had a signi cant multivariate impact on the investment motives. Although the multivariate tests show that the investment motives signi cantly differ across different groups of Employment, Marital status, Location, and Number of earning members, it is also needed to examine each independent variable separately for analyzing the differences across investment motives. (Kraemer & Blasey 2016).

Test of equality of means Employment
The results of the test of the between-subject effect show that the factor Employment has a signi cant impact only on the Nature of investment. This implies that the investors in different employment categories have not expressed the same level of importance on the factor Nature of investment i.e., periodical return, availability of expert advice, convenience, tax bene ts, rate of return, growth, and the riskiness of an investment. Government employees are attaching more importance (4.32) to these objectives than the investors in other employment categories. Research works of Gopi et al. (2018) and Geetha and Marimuthu (2019) support the ndings and claim that salaried employees give more importance to the nature of investments.  than Unmarried investors. The research work of Collard (2009) supports the ndings of the study, that marital status in uences the understanding and attitudes among couples towards investments and the related risk. Hence, there is a signi cant difference in giving importance to individual characteristics i.e., knowledge, con dence, ability, responsibility, and belief, and behavioral aspects i.e., prior loss, previous experience, and going with majority decisions. The location has a signi cant impact only on the Investors' options (Mental accounting or Psychological accounting). Investor options refer to mental accounting, which is an investment bias that makes investors consider the other options available and take a less optimal decision while investing. A research study by Sachan and Chugan (2020) claims there exists a difference in bias between rural and urban investors. Hence, investors in urban areas are attaching slightly higher importance (2.84) to Investors' options than the investors in other locations. The least importance is given by semi-urban investors (2.45). The number of earning members has a signi cant impact on the investment motives Safety/Stability and

Investors' options (Connection between investments). This implies that the investors with different
Numbers of earning members in their family have not expressed the same level of importance on the Safety/Stability and Investors' options. Investors with 1 or 2 number earning members in their family are attaching higher importance (>4.14) to the factor Safety/Stability than the investors with 3 number of earning members in their family. Also, the investors with only one earning member in their family are attaching a lower level of importance (2.61) than the investors with more earning members in their family on the factor Investors' options. There is no supporting literature evidence found to validate this difference.

Conclusion
Investors are heterogeneous concerning their demographic status i.e., gender, age, employment, education, marital status, location, residence, and socio-economic status i.e., monthly income, earning members, family type, and family size. Several research studies have analyzed the impact of demographic and socio-economic status on investor preference and behavior and found there exists a signi cant difference in investor preference and behavior. However, no study has examined the impact on 'Investment motive'. Hence an empirical study is performed in this research work to uncover the impact of the demographic and socioeconomic status on investment motives. Factor analysis found that the investment motives are aggregated as Nature of investments, future nancial needs, investor characteristics, safety and stability, investor behavior, and investors' options.
Further, the results of the Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found a main effect of employment, marital status, location, and the number of earning members on several investment motives. Likewise, there is a two-way interaction effect between age and location, gender and income, and age and income on the several investment motives. The ndings are very much in line with the past works of literature and evidence supports the conclusion. The study adds to the existing literature by analyzing the impact of demographic and socioeconomic status on 'Investment Motives'.
Besides, the study has the following limitation. The empirical ndings of the study are based on the data collected from 753 representative investors in India. Hence, it will not be exactly re ecting the empirical scenario in other geographic regions.

Declarations
Participants consent: Participants of the survey are fully informed about the purpose of the research study and given their consent to use the information for the research.