Do Investors Care About Biodiversity?

Alexandre Garel, Arthur Romec, Zacharias Sautner and Alexander Wagner
Additional contact information
Alexandre Garel: Audencia Business School
Arthur Romec: Toulouse Business School
Zacharias Sautner: Frankfurt School of Finance & Management; European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI)

No 23-24, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: This paper introduces a new proprietary measure of a firm's negative impact on biodiversity, the corporate biodiversity footprint, and studies whether it is priced in the cross-section of stock returns. Using an international sample of firms, we find no evidence that the biodiversity footprint explains these returns, on average. However, event-study evidence shows that, following the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15), which raised awareness of biodiversity issues, however, firms with larger corporate biodiversity footprints lost value. This response is consistent with investors revising their valuation of these firms downward upon the prospect that regulations to preserve biodiversity will become more stringent.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Corporate Biodiversity Footprint; Stock returns (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G12 G30 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 61 pages
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Do Investors Care About Biodiversity? (2023)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chf:rpseri:rp2324

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