EDHEC-Risk Climate Impact Institute Publications
ERCII publications
Decarbonization and the Pace of Economic Growth
2024
We use an adaptation of a popular Integrated Assessment Model according to which the carbon intensity, the rate of growth of the population and the cost of abatement technologies all strongly fall with GDP per person to explore whether this implies that the end-of-century temperature will be lower in states of high or low economic output (whether a ‘climate Kuznets curve’ is predicted by the model.) We find that, despite what we call the ‘technological optimism’ of the model, high (low) temperature outcomes are strongly associated with high (low) states of GDP or GDP per person....
The Link Between Physical and Transition Risk
2024
We argue that what is usually referred to as climate ‘transition risk’ can be more usefully decomposed in an expectation part and a variability around this central value. We show that there is a strong inverse relationship between the expectation component of transition costs and the expectation of physical damages, and how this relationship can be estimated. Our results indicate that the uncertainty in transition costs decreases as the abatement policy becomes more aggressive (and physical damage decrease), but remains large as a fraction of the expectation component. We also...
Scope for Divergence - A review of the importance of value chain emissions, the state of disclosure, estimation and modelling issues, and recommendations for companies, investors, and standard setters
2024
This policy report offers comprehensive insights into accounting for greenhouse gas emissions throughout companies’ value chains, and the challenges this process poses to companies and investors. Regulators are caught up in the contentious debate between investors and environmental NGOs who favour disclosure and business organisations and politicians representing fossil fuel interests who oppose it. The European Union requires the construction of its climate benchmarks to be steered by value chain emissions and has mandated corporate reporting of these emissions when material; across...
EDHEC-Risk Climate Impact Institute’s Response to the European Supervisory Authorities’ Call for Evidence on Greenwashing
2024
The demand for investments integrating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) dimensions has increased significantly in the past decade and the assets that financial intermediaries claim to manage responsibly and sustainably have close to trebled, reportedly growing to represent a third of overall assets under management. However, the industry-accepted definition of sustainable and responsible investing is nothing if not inclusive (Ducoulombier, 2023). As incorporating ESG issues into investment management now suffices to claim the responsible investment badge, the industry...
Climate Scenario Analysis and Stress Testing for Investors: A Probabilistic Approach
2024
The use of stress testing and scenario analysis is a generally accepted concept in financial risk management. However, climate scenarios are different in two respects: because they cannot be built by ‘resampling’ past history (as we have not encountered yet instances of the climate damages whose effects we want to explore); and because the end users of the scenarios are unlikely to be able to associate them even with very approximate probabili- ties (again, this is due to the unprecedented nature of climate change in historical times). In this paper, the authors therefore propose a framework...
Portfolio Losses from Climate Damages: A Guide for Long-Term Investors
2023
UK Local Government Pension Scheme authorities have experimented with reporting on their governance and management of climate risks, responding to challenges by non-governmental organisations and anticipating regulatory developments. Drawing on advice provided by investment consultants, their reports have included simulations of the impact of climate-related scenarios on investments suggesting that portfolios would only be marginally impacted, even in high temperature scenarios. In this paper, the author discusses the (de)merits of the advice addressed to pension trustees and engages with...
Value versus Values: What Is the Sign of the Climate Risk Premium?
2023
Given the conflicting messages about the magnitude and sign of the climate risk premium provided by the empirical studies to date, the author undertakes a theoretical estimation of the sign of the risk premium. He finds that, in absence of tipping points, the payoff of green (brown) securities covaries positively (negatively) with consumption growth, and should therefore command a positive (negative) risk premium. In a world without sharp and large discontinuities in damages green securities should not therefore be expected to act as effective climate hedges...
The Impact of Climate Change News on Low-minus-High Carbon Intensity Portfolios
2023
Several pioneering papers have already examined the link between climate news and equity market returns with a view to isolating “climate beta” that could be used to construct climate-risk hedging portfolios with easy-to-trade assets. However, this study applies the latest natural language processing methods to construct climate news indices from newspaper articles. Linguistic dictionary, lexical sentiment-based techniques, and state-of-the-art transformer-based models are used to capture climate change concerns in leading newspapers over the 2005-2021 period. Daily indices are built for...
Asleep at the Wheel? The Risk of Sudden Price Adjustments for Climate Risk
2023
A large number of studies has failed to date to identify a robust and economically significant climate risk premium or climate beta, either at the aggregate or at the sectoral level. The author examines several explanations of why this may be the case, and finds that a mispricing of climate risk is the most likely explanation. If this is true, price adjustments will eventually occur, either in a gradual or in an abrupt way. This is a novel source of risk, which should be on the radar screen of long-term investors. Three key takeaways: The author...
The Global Transboundary Climate Risk Report
2023
As their name suggests, transboundary climate risks do not respect national or international borders. They are being triggered by climate change and by our adaptation responses to that challenge. A climate hazard in one country may well have an impact that crosses national borders to affect its neighbours. In our interconnected world, however, its impact may also jump across entire regions and vast oceans to harm distant countries. From flooding in Bangkok that disrupts global industrial production, to the spread of diseases that hold back economies, transboundary climate risks are an...
Time-varying Environmental Betas and Latent Green Factors
2023
In this working paper entitled "Time-varying Environmental Betas and Latent Green Factors", the authors study whether the US stock market is pricing exposures to climate risks through the lense of a latent linear factor model with time-varying betas estimable by an extension of the instrumented principal component analysis (IPCA) of Kelly, Pruitt, and Su (2019). In their specification, the factor loadings are allowed to be functions of both “financial” and environmental (“green”) company specific characteristics, such as ESG ratings and carbon intensity. They extend the...
Optimal Climate Policy with Negative Emissions
2023
We can limit the future temperature impact of climate change in two ways: reducing our use of CO2 emitting fuels as an energy source (abatement), and using negative emission technologies (NETs) to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere (removal). Using a modification of the DICE model, authors analyse the optimal use of these two policy responses to climate change. After calibrating the marginal costs of abatement and CO2 removal to the latest scientific information, they find that carbon removal must play a very important role in an optimal...
The Agency of Greenwashing
2022
As climate change increasingly challenges business models, the disclosure of firm environmental performance casts growing attention by corporate stakeholders. This creates wider opportunities and incentives for greenwashing behaviors. We propose a novel measure of greenwashing and investigate its determinants and consequences for US firms. We show the that board characteristics are variously associated with the apparent degree of corporate greenwashing. Importantly, we find that greenwashing reduces firm value
Institutional Investors and Corporate Carbon Footprint: Global Evidence
2021
Climate-aware institutional investors are assumed to affect the transition towards a low carbon economy by exercising their prerogatives as owners of global companies. Investors concerned with climate change can influence investee companies’ carbon footprint by voting at shareholder meetings on climate-related issues and by actively engaging with executives and board members. Authors study to what extent institutional investors’ ownership affected corporate carbon emissions in 68 countries for the period of 2007 to 2018. Results show that institutional investment on average does not...
Measuring and Managing ESG Risks in Sovereign Bond Portfolios and Implications for Sovereign Debt Investing
2021
This study, “Measuring and Managing ESG Risks in Sovereign Bond Portfolios and Implications for Sovereign Debt Investing" demonstrates that implementation choices regarding how ESG constraints are incorporated in the context of sovereign bond portfolio construction have a material impact on this opportunity cost. In particular, we find that higher environmental scores for developed countries and higher social scores for emerging countries are associated with lower costs of borrowing for issuers and consequently with lower yields for investors. We also confirm that negative screening leads to...
Climate Change and Credit Risk
2020
Authors investigate the relationship between exposure to climate change and firm credit risk. They show that the distance-to-default, a widely used market-based measure of corporate default risk, is negatively associated with the amount of a firm’s carbon emissions and carbon intensity. Therefore, companies with high carbon footprint are perceived by the market as more likely to default, ceteris paribus. The carbon footprint decreases the distance-to-default following shocks - such as the Paris Agreement - that reveal policymakers’ intention to implement stricter climate policies. Overall,...
Performance of Socially Responsible Investment Funds against an Efficient SRI Index: The Impact of Benchmark Choice when Evaluating Active Managers - An Update
2012
This paper conducts a performance measurement of SRI funds and assesses the impact of changing the reference from a standard SRI index to an efficient SRI index. The analysis of fund performance shows that an efficient SRI index raises the bar for actively managed SRI funds. While about 62% of funds have a positive information ratio when compared to the cap-weighted EuroStoxx Sustainability Index, only about 36% of funds do so with respect to the Efficient SRI Index. It is also interesting to note that the median information ratio across funds is slightly positive (0.04) when using the...
The Performance of Socially Responsible Investment and Sustainable Development in France: An Update after the Financial Crisis
2010
In an initial study done in 2008, EDHEC-Risk Institute established that socially responsible (SRI) funds—those funds made by selecting securities that meet ESG (environmental, social, governance) criteria—distributed in France did not produce both positive and statistically significant alpha. That study, which relied on the Fama-French three-factor model, covered a six-year period ending in December 2007, thus not including the recent financial crisis. The purpose of the present study was to update these results by extending the analysis to the years 2008 and 2009.
French Corporate Social Responsibility: Which Dimension Pays More?
2010
We use a sample of 148 events related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) to assess the impact of CSR on corporate financial performance. There is considerable heterogeneity in market reaction to different dimensions of CSR. Not all dimensions offer a positive reward; some yield a negative and even statistically significant impact on the firms’ stock returns. One main conclusion of this study is that socially responsible investment is not an excuse for passive management. There is still room for timing and stock picking within the socially responsible universe of stocks.
Adoption of Green Investing by Institutional Investors: A European Survey
2010
This document reviews the concept of green investing and reports the results of a European survey of investment management professionals. The objective is to provide background on industry and academic research into green investing and assess the views and uses of green investing. Our survey shows that green investing is a significant movement in which survey respondents are heavily involved. Nearly 90% of respondents consider environmental protection an investment theme and the same percentage plans to do more green investing in the future.
Socially Responsible Investment Performance in France
2008
The results of this EDHEC position paper show that none of the sixty-two funds in the sample, covering various investment zones, manage to produce both positive and significant alpha (outperformance) over a six-year period and that the few significant alpha values are negative. Moreover, most of the funds generate negative, non-significant alpha. The study also shows that alpha values estimated over one year change greatly from one year to the next. The use of a period of various lengths shows that results can vary greatly from one length to another.
La problématique du taux d’actualisation des concessionnaires d’autoroutes : le cas des ASF
2006
L’objectif de ce rapport a été, dans un premier temps, de trancher le débat méthodologique sur le choix de la valeur du taux d’actualisation des concessionnaires autoroutiers dans le cadre de leur actuelle privatisation. De nombreuses polémiques sont nées en référence à un rapport du Commissariat général au Plan de février 2005, qui conclut que les projets d’investissements publics doivent être réalisés sur 17/23 la base d’un taux d’actualisation de 4%. A notre avis, ce taux ne peut pas être retenu dans le cadre d’une valorisation effectuée par un investisseur privé, car il n’intègre...
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Operating from campuses in Lille, Nice, Paris, London and Singapore, EDHEC is one of the world’s top 15 business schools. Fully international and directly connected to the business world, EDHEC commands a strong reputation for research excellence and the ability to train entrepreneurs and managers capable of breaking new ground. EDHEC functions as a genuine laboratory of ideas and produces innovative solutions valued by businesses. The School’s teaching is inspired by its research work and a focus on “learning by doing”, all with the aim of equipping people with the skills to succeed in business.
