Preliminary Conference Programme

Transitioning from internal combustion vehicles (ICEs) to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) is widely considered essential to achieve climate goals. Although BEV adoption is rising, it varies substantially across regions and remains low in many countries despite significant investment from automakers and governments. Prior research has emphasized behavioral impediments to adoption, like range anxiety, and explored infrastructure design to support BEVs, often relying on surveys or niche settings like car sharing. However, little is known about how BEVs are used in everyday life, how their usage compares to ICEs, and how charging infrastructure shapes these patterns. Using a large dataset of U.S. vehicles, we demonstrate that BEVs are driven as much overall as ICEs but make about three fewer long-distance trips (>150km) per year. We find that increasing charging density to a moderate level reduces this long-distance trip gap more effectively than increasing charging reliability. We further show that convenient home-charging, rather than range anxiety, better explains differences between BEV recharging and ICE refueling. Our results can help automakers design more attractive service offerings for BEV buyers, guide infrastructure providers and governments to improve charging access, and offer empirical evidence to inform public understanding and academic research on real-world BEV usage.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of collaborative engagement in influencing corporate behaviour. Specifically, I examine the impact of Climate Action 100+, the world’s largest climate-related investor coalition, on targeted firms. To proxy the coalition’s engagement goals, I collect novel data on climate-related disclosure, sector-specific carbon intensities and emission reduction targets. I find that collaborative engagement influenced only target setting among a subgroup of firms selected on a discretionary basis. Surprisingly, the coalition’s scale does not amplify impact and there is no evidence of spillovers to non-target firms. These findings question whether investor coalitions drive corporate decarbonisation.

We examine the irreversibility of corporate climate investments under market and political uncertainty. In response to carbon pricing policies, firms generally increase relatively reversible investments, such as product sourcing. However, when carbon pricing is more stringent or the political environment is more stable, firms undertake more irreversible investments, such as joint ventures and research collaborations. These shifts towards irreversibility are more pronounced for high-cost decarbonization technologies and firms with shorter investment horizons. Regionally, EU firms engage in more irreversible investments during later phases of the EU Emission Trading Scheme. U.S. firms undertake more irreversible investments under the Biden Administration than the Trump Administration, but less so for projects targeted by the Inflation Reduction Act, which is subject to higher regulatory uncertainty. Finally, irreversible investments are followed by larger emission reductions. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of the broader political environment in shaping the structure of corporate climate investments in the low-carbon transition.

We examine whether cheaper financing conditions facilitate firms' transition away from carbon-intensive activities and toward sustainable ones, measured by the share of revenue from green activities ("green revenue"). Using a novel revenue-decomposition dataset for Chinese listed firms, we find that lower costs of debt are associated with a higher green-revenue share, with effects concentrated in high-emission (brown) sectors. The association is stronger for smaller firms and for firms with richer ex-ante green technologies. Exploiting policy-induced reductions in borrowing costs, we document a plausibly causal effect of cheaper debt on increases in green revenue. We corroborate these patterns in a global sample. Taken together, the results indicate that financing the transition of brown sectors—by lowering the marginal cost of capital for credible investments—can materially accelerate corporate decarbonization. We discuss implications for emerging transition-finance frameworks.

The climate crisis and rising inequality require a fundamental change in the relationship between finance and maritime resources, especially Indonesia's Blue Economy Roadmap and the Financial Services Authority's sustainable finance initiatives. This article critically investigates Indonesia's legal framework on FIs' Sustainable Blue Economy promotion. The paper examines Indonesian rules' ability and constraints to mandate FIs to be blue economy stewards, achieving ecological and economic justice for coastal communities. The article studies financial service legislation and corporate governance principles in the growth-oriented economic paradigm using normative legal research and a socio-legal perspective. FIs often focus short-term returns and fail to integrate environmental deterioration as a financial risk, revealing a regulatory gap and philosophical stagnation. Foundational sustainable finance policies lack the legislative precision and explicit mandates needed to address ocean-related risks and leverage FIs, notably in regulating non-publicly traded nh businesses. The study proposes legal paradigm shift. The findings highlight the need for a strong legislative obligation for ocean-specific risk disclosure and a rethinking of fiduciary duties to compel FI stewardship. Such reforms are necessary to integrate sustainability criteria into funding and investment decisions, counterbalancing unsustainable exploitation and supporting fair maritime sector progress in Indonesia.