Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 24th Aug 2026, 01:48:15am WEST
External resources will be made available 30 min before a session starts. You may have to reload the page to access the resources.
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
Egg-Timer: Energy Transition and Technology Adoption Location: D-110 Session Chair: Graham Macklin, Toulouse School of Economics | |
    | |
Rewarding Green Goals: The Effects of Environmental Incentives for CEOs 1: Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Germany; 2: University of Cambridge; 3: ETH Zurich This paper examines whether linking CEO compensation to environmental performance leads to measurable improvements in firms’ greenhouse gas emissions. Using global firm-level data from 2015–2024, we exploit staggered adoption and regulatory-driven variation in the introduction of environmental bonus components in CEO pay to track changes in Scope 1 emissions. Across all specifications, we find no statistically significant effect of introducing environmental incentives on direct emissions. To understand this null result, we analyze the structure of these incentives and show that environmental bonus components are typically small relative to total compensation and rely heavily on qualitative, non-verifiable targets. Combined with limited technical environmental expertise at the board level, these design features weaken the potential for incentives to influence operational decisions. Our findings suggest that current ESG-linked compensation schemes, particularly among U.S. firms facing regulatory-induced adoption, function largely as symbolic commitments rather than effective drivers of decarbonization, and highlight the need for more rigorous, quantitatively grounded incentive structures to align executive pay with climate goals. | |