Climate Finance & ESG Research

How does climate risk impact financial market volatility? A quantitative study examining the nexus of climate change, ESG practices, and stock market volatility in UK listed firms using panel data models.

Examines why higher-emitting firms bolster ESG ratings through transparency and governance rather than emissions reductions. Uses capability-contingency theory to explain ESG paradoxes in Asian markets.

Documents a significant negative relationship between climate risk and firm value with geographic variation. Asia faces highest risk, followed by Europe and North America. Innovation moderates this effect.

Study examines the impact of renewable/non-renewable energy, governance, and economic growth on environmental sustainability. Findings reveal that renewable energy and governance quality boost environmental sustainability, while non-renewables deter it. These effects are most pronounced in developed countries, followed by emerging and then frontier countries.

Investigates the impact of firm climate risk exposure on market volatility, with a particular focus on the moderating roles of firm-specific and country-level characteristics. Comprehensive global panel of 38,808 firm-year observations across 54 countries.

Investigates the impact of firm climate risk exposure on market volatility, with a particular focus on the moderating roles of firm-specific and country-level characteristics. Comprehensive global panel of 38,808 firm-year observations across 54 countries.

This study examines why ESG performance stabilizes banks in some countries but not others, analyzing 660 banks across 58 countries from 2002-2023. The research reveals that national culture and formal institutions are critical moderators explaining this heterogeneity.

Does Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) improve financial reporting quality, or does it merely shift the locus of managerial opportunism? We investigate this ethical paradox using an extensive global dataset of 67,244 firm-year observations spanning 65 countries from 2002 to 2024. We document a significant and robust substitution effect: while high-CSR firms engage in less accrual-based earnings management, They compensate by increasing operational manipulations of real earnings, such as cutting R&D or overproducing inventory.

Examines how firm-level climate attention affects corporate valuation and financial risk under conditions of systemic deep uncertainty. Using a large international panel of publicly listed firms, we show that heightened climate attention is associated with significant declines in firm value and pronounced changes in stock return volatility.

We document a robust positive association between nature dependence and investment inefficiency. This relationship strengthens significantly in operationally rigid environments, high-tangibility, capital-intensive firms and periods of rapid fixed-asset expansion, and is economically meaningful only when capital-adjustment frictions are elevated. Effects are most pronounced in the upper tail of the inefficiency distribution.

This study examines how corporate culture shapes financial reporting through three distinct channels: accrual earnings management, real earnings management, and narrative disclosures of intangible liabilities. Using 61,170 firm-year observations from U.S. firms over 2002–2021, we find that culture operates as a form-specific governance mechanism that reallocates rather than uniformly constrains reporting discretion. Culture-strong firms exhibit substantially lower real earnings management, reflecting peer enforcement of operationally observable choices, but higher accrual earnings management, which is consistent with strategic income smoothing to manage investors’ expectations. Culture-strong firms also disclose contingent liabilities more comprehensively, supporting transparency mechanisms.