Conference Agenda

Session
CL 05: Environmental Risk and Sustainability
Time:
Friday, 18/Aug/2023:
1:30pm - 3:00pm

Session Chair: Alminas Zaldokas, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Location: 6A-00 (floor 6)


Presentations
ID: 1538

Corporate Taxation and Carbon Emissions

Thorsten Martin, Luigi Iovino, Julien Sauvagnat

Bocconi University, Italy

Discussant: Florian Heider (LIF-SAFE & Goethe University Frankfurt)

We study the relationship between corporate taxation and carbon emissions in the U.S. We show that dirty firms pay lower profit taxes. This relationship is driven by dirty firms benefiting disproportionately more from the tax shield of debt due to their higher leverage. In addition, we document that the higher leverage of dirty firms is fully accounted for by the larger share of tangible assets owned by such firms. We build a general-equilibrium multi-sector economy and show that a revenue-neutral increase in profit taxation could lead to large decreases in aggregate carbon emissions without any noticeable change in GDP.

EFA2023_1538_CL 05_1_Corporate Taxation and Carbon Emissions.pdf


ID: 969

Does Climate Change Adaptation Matter? Evidence from the City on the Water

Matteo Benetton1, Simone Emiliozzi2, Elisa Guglielminetti2, Michele Loberto2, Alessandro Mistretta2

1University of California at Berkeley, United States of America; 2Bank of Italy

Discussant: Guojun He (University of Hong Kong)

This paper exploits the operation of a sea wall built to protect the city of Venice from increasingly high tides to provide evidence on the capitalization of public infrastructure investment in climate change adaptation into housing values. Properties above the sea wall activation threshold experience a permanent reduction in flood risk and expected damages, which are reflected in higher prices. Using a difference-in-differences hedonic design we show that the sea wall led to a 4.5% increase in the value of the residential housing stock in Venice, which is a lower bound on the total welfare gains generated by the infrastructure.

EFA2023_969_CL 05_2_Does Climate Change Adaptation Matter Evidence from the City.pdf


ID: 778

Dirty Air and Clean Investments: The impact of pollution information on ESG investment

Raymond Fisman1, Pulak Ghosh2, Arkodipta Sarkar3, Jian Zhang4

1Boston University; 2Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore; 3National University of Singapore; 4University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China)

Discussant: Christoph Schiller (Arizona State University)

We study the link between exposure to pollution information and investment portfolio allocations, exploiting the rollout of air quality monitoring stations during 2006-2019 in India. Using a triple-difference framework, we show that retail investors' investments in ``brown'' stocks become more negatively related to local air pollution after a monitoring station appears nearby. Since green stocks do not outperform brown stocks over this period, we suggest that our findings are likely driven by investor tastes and pollution salience rather than a shift in expected returns.The effect of pollution information on investment choices is most prominent amongst tech-savvy investors who are most plausibly ``treated'' by real-time pollution data, and by younger investors who tend to be more sensitive to environmental concerns. Overall, our results provide micro-level support for the view that salience of environmental conditions affect investors' tastes for green versus brown investments.

EFA2023_778_CL 05_3_Dirty Air and Clean Investments.pdf