Does Demographics Influence the Risk Behaviour of Urban Investors? A Machine Learning Model Based Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of demographic attributes on investment decision-making. We consider six demographic attributes such as gender, age, education, profession, income and number of dependents for analysing their influence on the investment decision making of the urban investors of the Asansol-Durgapur industrial belt, West Bengal, India and intend to forecast the risk tolerance behaviour. Around 2000 respondents took part in our study. The primary data were analysed using logistic regression and subsequently, we used the linear discriminant analysis method for validation purposes. We notice that gender and profession are the two demographic factors that have the most significant impact on the financial risk tolerance (FRT) of the retail investors, whereas income and number of dependents have negligible impact.

Keywords

• Retail urban investors; Financial Risk Tolerance (FRT); Investor Behaviour; Demographic Factors; Logistic Regression; Linear Discriminant Analysis