Tag Archives: Climate Change

Where the Wild Things Are? The Governance of Private Companies 

By | April 20, 2023

Privately owned companies far outnumber public ones. They constitute the lion’s share of the companies in our world and, accordingly, have a comprehensive impact on commercial reality. There are over 25,000,000 private companies in the U.S. and around 4,000 public ones. Furthermore, while the number of public corporations is lower than its peak in the… Read More »

Climate Disclosure Line-Drawing – and Why to Take Both Sides in the ESG Debate Seriously 

By | April 20, 2023

Over the past year, three converging trends have put environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) topics at the center of yet another polarizing national debate.   ESG Mainstreaming. The first is that investments that integrate ESG factors in some way have gone mainstream over the past decade.  ESG is no longer limited to “sustainable, responsible, and impact”… Read More »

Climate-Related Uncertainty and Managerial Short-Termism

By | August 12, 2022

In a new study, we examine whether climate-related uncertainty leads to increased managerial short-termism. “Climate-related uncertainty” refers to managers’ inability to predict the scale and costs of climate change on their firm’s operating environment. Managers, policy makers, and institutional investors have all expressed increased concern about climate-related uncertainty, especially uncertainty stemming from exposure to natural… Read More »

How to Contract for ESG: Sustainability-Linked Bonds and a New Investor Paradigm 

By | July 14, 2022

Companies today are facing unprecedented pressure to make progress on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. The demand for companies to address these issues is not new, but a relatively recent development is that this demand now comes from investors, rather than activists or other stakeholders. The pressure from investors has caused many companies to… Read More »

ESG Commitment and the Value of “Walking the Talk”: Evidence from Closed-End Funds

By | April 5, 2022

Does a firm’s initiative for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) increase firm value? In our recent working paper, we investigate how a firm’s commitment to ESG can increase (or decrease) the firm value using closed-end funds (CEFs) as an empirical laboratory. In particular, we focus on the role of credible commitments to ESG in determining the… Read More »

The role of capital markets in saving the planet and changing capitalism – just kidding 

By | March 31, 2022

Given the emphasis on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) in the media and among the finance community, one could easily believe that capital markets are a major contributor to the goal of limiting global warming. We argue this perception is largely false; a narrative strongly pushed by the finance industry to highlight green initiatives and,… Read More »

Giving the ‘green light’ to executive pay? Shareholder monitoring and pay-for-carbon-performance

By | March 7, 2022

Climate change poses significant risks to the private sector, which researchers estimate to be in the order of $2.5-24 trillion, or up to 17% of global assets under management. However, given the most significant climate change risks may not materialize within the tenure of current corporate and financial actors, direct incentives to avert the tragedy of the horizon may… Read More »

Financing Climate Justice: Taxation-and-Bonds Strategy

By | March 2, 2022

During the most recent United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP-26) on Climate Change, fair financialization of climate justice endeavors gained unprecedented momentum. This post proposes a novel taxation-and-bonds strategy that targets redistributing the gains of a warming earth around the world to offset the losses of global warming. Contemporary attempts to finance climate change mitigation… Read More »

Freedom of Information and Industrial Pollution

By | February 15, 2022

Industrial pollution has staggering consequences in terms of premature deaths, productivity losses, and health care costs. In 2015, conservative estimates put the number of pollution-related deaths at nine million, which represents roughly 16% of all deaths worldwide, and the financial cost of pollution-related deaths and sickness at 4.6 trillion US dollars, which represents about 6.2%… Read More »

Recent Comments on Improving Accountability in Net-Zero Commitments

By | February 9, 2022

With the rapid expansion of corporate net-zero commitments and the recent pledge by financial institutions (FIs) – with over $130 trillion in assets – at COP26 in Glasgow to hit net-zero emissions by 2050, a credible mechanism to measure these commitments and hold companies accountable for meeting them is of critical importance. To that end,… Read More »