We evaluate the sustainability of real estate investment vehicles in Switzerland according to the three Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) pillars. For this purpose, we conducted a survey of direct investors (real estate investment companies, funds, and foundations) inquiring about...

This paper studies the relationship between green funds and firms' attention to sustainability. By using a natural language processing algorithm that extracts topics from texts, we measure the extent to which firms talk about sustainable energy during earnings conference calls. We use our...

In the build-up to and especially in the weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, stocks strongly exposed to the regulatory risks of the transition to a low-carbon economy did well, suggesting an expected slow-down of that transition. Analysts increased their earnings estimates for these...

In recent years, governments have allocated increasing capital to direct startup funding through Government-sponsored Venture Capital funds (GVC). In this paper, we study the role of GVCs in the venture capital market and their relationship with Private Venture Capitalists (PVC). Using European...

We propose a novel way of measuring the equity portfolio-level environmental and social characteristics of a 13F institution (the “sustainability footprint”) and examine the relation between sustainability footprints and risk-adjusted investment performance. The analysis shows that 13F...

Using a sample of S&P 500 firms between 2013 and 2017, we study the impact of ESG rating disagreement on stock returns. We conjecture that for disagreement about environmental ratings, a risk-based explanation induces a positive relationship between rating disagreement and stock returns. In...

This paper evaluates the impact of a screening process based on Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores for an otherwise passive portfolio of investment-grade corporate bonds. The main result is that this filtering leads to a substantial improvement of the targeted ESG score without...

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores are the main tool for asset managers in designing and implementing ESG investment strategies. They amalgamate a broad range of fundamentally different factors, creating ambiguity for investors as to the signals of higher or lower ESG scores. We...

In this paper, we build portfolios with decreasing carbon footprint, which passive investors can use as new Paris-consistent (PC) benchmarks and have the same risk- adjusted returns as business as usual (BAU) benchmarks. As the distribution of firms' carbon intensity is very skewed, excluding a...

Mutual funds must publish policies announcing how they generally vote on the different ballot items at the shareholder meetings of their portfolio firms. I manually collect 17,000 of these policies for a sample of 29 of the largest U.S. mutual fund families over 2006-2018. I find that voting...