Conference Agenda

The intensive utilization of residential space is crucial to the transition to a carbon-neutral residential sector, especially for emerging economies with massive housing constructions such as China, although it has received far less attention in the literature. Here, we develop a novel methodology to estimate the volume of unused housing in urban China, defined as dwelling units that have been built and sold for at least two years but never occupied. By early 2021, 17.4% of the housing stock built during the first two decades of this century remains unused, with the unused rate being particularly high in most third-tier cities. The construction and operation of unused housing costs 28.26 million tons of CO₂ annually at the national level, which accounts for 4.3% of Chinese residential sector’s carbon emissions, or 19.7% of the carbon emission reductions achieved by China’s primary ongoing residential decarbonization efforts from the efficiency perspective. Our projections for 2021–2030 indicate that avoiding the further increase of unused housing and utilizing existing unused dwelling units can make a significant decarbonization contribution.

Flood and other climate risks will cause huge damage to housing and infrastructure. However, Past research offers mixed evidence on whether climate risks damages are capitalized into the fair market value of properties. By constructing a model-based classification method, we find that climate risks sensitivity will increase the impact of climate risks on housing price. Our findings indicate that due to the flood risks, the average house price of cities with low flood sensitivity decreased by 2.6%, while the average house price of cities with high flood sensitivity decreased by 14.2%. Besides, we show that variation in climate risks sensitivity aligns with other climate risk measures from related studies and with commonly held views on climate exposures. During 2015 and 2020, approximately 3.6% of decrease in the housing price can be attributed to the flood risks in high flood sensitive cities. while for the low flood sensitive cities, the proportion is only 0.6%. Further studies show that past flood experiences are helpful in mitigating the upcoming flood damage.

This study explores whether responsible investing is rewarded in real estate investment trusts (REITs). It examines the relationships between the individual components of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and future stock returns of REITs in the US. The results indicate that overall ESG performance has no significant relationship with future returns; however, environmental performance negatively predicts expected returns and social performance is positively associated with future returns. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Pedersen et al. (2021), we examine whether the ESG score predicts the future firm fundamentals of REITs and whether the ESG score affects investor preferences in REITs. Our findings suggest that environmental performance negatively affects firm fundamentals in REITs, in terms of future profits, external financing, and stock risk, whereas social performance is positively associated with future firm fundamentals. Institutional investors are indifferent to environmental performance and do not adjust their portfolios accordingly. In contrast, institutional investors increase their ownership of REITs with a strong social performance. Overall, this study reveals that environmental performance negatively predicts future stock return in REITs due to its negative effect on subsequent firm fundamentals, whereas social performance can deliver superior stock returns because it improves future firm fundamentals and sophisticated investors underreact to its predictability.

Exploiting the exogenous nature of flood timings in the United States, we study how floods influence outflow and inflow migration using a difference-in-differences analysis. We further interact this with intensity of media coverage on such floods to examine the effect of information nudges on such trends. Our findings show that floods cause a population replacement effect in affected counties, whereby they trigger younger, higher-earning, and employed agents out of, and attract older, lower-income and unemployed agents into affected zones. Furthermore, both these migration trends are amplified by the information nudge. We further find that this replacement effect causes a depression in housing prices in affected areas post-flood. Our results shed light on how information provision interacts with migration incentives in wake of natural disasters.