Conference Agenda

Using a sample covering the RUSSELL 3000 constituents, we show that environmental disclosure quality is lower for firms with high stock price sensitivity to climate news. Our findings indicate that the negative association between climate sensitivity and environmental disclosure quality is stronger when firms face higher levels of stakeholder scrutiny or when their managers are risk-averse. We further show that high climate sensitivity firms issue less equity and face a heightened cost of equity when they have a higher environmental disclosure quality. These results align with the theoretical predictions of Bond and Zeng (2022) regarding the disclosure choices of firms’ managers when stakeholders’ interpretation of ESG information is ex-ante uncertain. Overall, our findings highlight the usefulness of mandatory environmental reporting to ensure the quality of environmental disclosure, particularly for firms with high degrees of climate sensitivity.

What are the long-run effects of flooding on home values? We use new difference-in-difference methods for setups with local spillovers to analyze the effects of 2012 hurricane Sandy on New York's housing market. We show that, more than a decade after the storm and long after damage was repaired, flooded properties continue to sell at a substantial discount. Our estimates also suggest that the discount is inversely related to the severity of flooding, consistent with the stronger informational signal conveyed by flooding of less exposed properties. Last, we estimate large local spillover effects that persistently lowered the values of nearby non-flooded properties. Spillover effects reduce homeowners' incentives to invest in flood-mitigation actions, as such individual efforts cannot fully prevent value depreciation.

This paper examines how Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) capital affects the environmental footprint of multinational firms. Using the inverse relationship between

industrial pollution and satellite-based vegetation health measured by the

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), we combine NDVI with SRI ownership

data for 52,806 facilities operated by 911 multinationals across 124 countries

from 2006 to 2020. Higher SRI ownership improves nearby vegetation, a result

corroborated using mergers as plausibly exogenous ownership shocks. However,

improvements at OECD facilities coincide with deterioration at non-OECD sites,

indicating pollution displacement that intensifies with stronger investor engagement.

This study examines whether climate finance allocations align with development needs and just benchmarks, as well as what observed patterns imply for climate finance governance. Using 2023 data from the Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance, we analyse the regional distribution of flows across mitigation, adaptation, instruments, and institutional channels. We combine (i) descriptive decompositions and inequality metrics for geographic concentration with (ii) a justice-adjusted intensity measure that normalises regional finance by GDP (PPP) as a proxy for economic capacity, and (iii) flow-level regressions that condition on destination region and sector to identify correlates of finance volumes across uses, instruments, and actors. Results show a strongly mitigation-dominated portfolio and substantial concentration of finance in a small number of destination regions. The capacity-normalised benchmark indicates only weak alignment between finance intensity and constrained economic capacity. Regression evidence suggests that—depending on geography and sector—adaptation-labelled flows and grant-based instruments are associated with smaller flow magnitudes relative to mitigation and market-rate debt baselines, which is consistent with intermediation incentives prioritising scale, risk management, and bankable pipelines. We argue that accounting boundaries (global totals versus internationally oriented support) are central to interpreting “progress” in climate finance and to burden-sharing debates. Our findings are intended to inform ongoing discussions on the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) that was agreed at the Baku climate conference in 2024 (COP29), on transparency and comparability of climate finance accounting, and on reforms to multilateral development bank mandates and incentive structures to better align scale with equity and resilience objectives.