Are firms doing good? And, if so, why do they engage in social responsibility? To find out, we model corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a choice of the firm to self-restrain from the full exploitation of a production set that contains negative externalities. Compared to such an...

Fossil fuel divestment campaigns urge investors to sell their stakes in companies that supply coal, oil, and gas. However, avoiding investments in such companies can be expected to impose a financial cost on the investor because of reduced opportunities for portfolio diversification. We compare...

To test if safety nets create moral hazard in the banking industry, we develop a simultaneous structural two-equations model that specifies the probability of a bailout and banks' risk taking.We identify the effect of expected bailout probabilities on risk taking using exclusion restrictions...

We analyze the effects of socially responsible investment and public abatement on environmental quality and the economy in a continuous-time dynamic growth model featuring optimizing households and firms. Environmental quality is modelled as a renewable resource. Consumers can invest in...

We present a model to test the null hypothesis that firms organize their corporate governance arrangements optimally given the constraints they face. Following the literature, the model rejects the null if the conditional correlation between governance and performance is significantly different...

We analyze the effects of socially responsible investment and public abatement on environmental quality and the economy in a continuous-time dynamic growth model featuring optimizing households and firms. Environmental quality is modelled as a renewable resource. Consumers can invest in...

We document a puzzling phenomenon, namely that overnight returns in Chinese stock markets are on average statistically and economically significantly negative. This finding seems to violate conventional asset pricing theory, yet the anomaly is robust to the choice of stock exchange, type of...

Firms that score low on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) indicators exhibit higher expected returns. This negative ESG premium might be driven by higher risk associated with low ESG scores, or it could signal investors' preferences for firms with high ESG scores. The first driver...

To test if safety nets create moral hazard in the banking industry, we develop a simultaneous structural two-equations model that specifies the probability of a bailout and banks' risk taking.We identify the effect of expected bailout probabilities on risk taking using exclusion restrictions...

We analyze how corporate financing decisions affect stock returns in a stochastic Ramsey model. Motivated by stylized facts, we incorporate two distinct features in the model. First, the supply of equity (the number of outstanding shares) is fixed. Second, firms pursue a target leverage ratio,...