Conference Agenda

This paper investigates the role of investor coalitions in regulating corporate climate action. It assesses the impact of the world's largest investor coalition on climate change, Climate Action 100+ (CA100+). Measuring corporate climate action is challenging. To overcome common measurement problems, this study conducts a multidimensional assessment of companies' progress in the low-carbon transition. It is among the first to use a forward-looking metric. To obtain sufficient time series data, I augment an existing dataset, evaluating the ambition of corporate carbon emission reduction targets, with new primary data collected for 296 companies. Then, I employ a first-differences analysis to evaluate trends and a sophisticated methodology of matching in combination with Difference-in-Differences analyses to isolate the causal impact of CA100+. The findings reveal no effect of CA100+ on companies' disclosure and historical carbon emissions but show a heterogenous impact on companies' medium- and long-term targets. Surprisingly, the effect on targets holds only for companies potentially selected based on prior investor knowledge which raises questions about the selectivity of investor action. Moreover, the absence of an effect on short-term targets highlights the risk of companies backloading corporate decarbonisation efforts, which could imply greenwashing.

This paper evaluates the effect of the obligation for French firms of more than 500 employees to publish carbon reports to see if it led to changes in carbon emission decisions at the firm level. In particular, we identify abatement expenses and change in energy mix composition as the two levers that firms can use to bring down the level of carbon emissions. We apply a difference-in-differences and instrumental variable model to estimate both the Intention-to-Treat and

Average Treatment Effect, and thus the effect of the policy on abatement expenses and on the share of different energy inputs in the energy mix. We find that large firms tend to

spend more on abatement items that can decrease the potential carbon dioxide released from the production process, while finding no strong evidence that publishing firms will modify their energy mix composition, either in favor of less carbon heavy inputs like natural gas, or toward electrification.

China is establishing green finance system to boost energy transition and green development. But its effectiveness has been under controversy due to the heterogeneity in regional context and complexity in functional mechanism. We compose a green finance index for the 30 provinces in China and test its correlation with the diffusion of renewable energies and economic growth for the period from 2016 to 2022. With a dynamic spatial Durbin model, we find that green finance has lagged effect on renewable energy development and this effect spillovers to neighboring regions. In some regions in China, the spatial spillover effect dominates the effect of local green finance in boosting renewable energies. With a coupling and coordination degree model, we further prove a strong and enhancing correlation between the development of green finance and renewable energies. The correlation diverse across regions, i.e. highest in the west and lowest in the east, but the gap is narrowing. Hinted by the empirical results, we suggest that concentrating resource to promote green finance in selected provinces, especially in western regions, in China can potentially boost the development of renewable energies around the whole country via spillover effect, and thus, improve the policy efficiency.

Understanding what leads firms to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions is crucial to manage the green industrial transformation. Aggregate evidence suggests that a shift towards cleaner product portfolios is an important channel through which firms decrease their emissions. But using German administrative micro-data, we show that firm-level product portfolio choices do not occur the way existing theory would predict: We observe a re-shuffling within the most emissions-intensive products rather than a shift away from them. We also find that firms with wider product scopes are more emissions-intensive than others -- even though they should be the most productive firms according to existing theory. To make sense of these findings, we extend the canonical model of product portfolio choice to include energy as a factor of production. In our model framework, heterogeneous energy prices between firms (e.g. due to differences in regulation or fuel composition) can explain the unexpected empirical patterns we observe. This has important implications for the design of green industrial policy.