Using transaction-level credit card spending from a leading Chinese commercial bank, we show that consumers prefer firms with higher Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) profiles. Specifically, we show that consumers increase their consumption by 4.9 percentage points as the ESG rating...

Most existing text-based sentiment measures in finance are lexicon-based which are effectively based on word counts of positive and negative sentiment dictionaries, and naturally lose most information. We measure news sentiment using BERT, a state-of-the-art large language model, which reads and...

Results from a large sample of individual Chinese investors demonstrate that they were more likely to trade stocks for short-term speculation after experiencing trauma such as natural disasters, serious illness, or death in their immediate family. They exhibited higher impulsivity, a greater...

In this paper, we examine the trade-offs firms make in their voluntary disclosure decisions following negative media coverage of climate change incidents. We combine a keyword discovery algorithm and a fine-tuned BERT model to identify “hard” and “soft” climate disclosures on Twitter. We...