Investor Attention to Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement and Stock Returns

Imane El Ouadghiri, Mathieu Gomes, Jonathan Peillex and Guillaume Pijourlet

The Energy Journal, 2022, vol. 43, issue 6, 285-308

Abstract: This study investigates whether the investor attention to the fossil fuel divestment (III.)) movement is related to the stock returns on firms involved in extracting fossil fuels. Three complementary indicators of investor attention to the FFD movement are considered: (1) the U.S. weekly Google Search Volume Index on the topic “fossil fuel divestment,†(2) the U.S. weekly media coverage of fossil fuel divestment, and (3) the number of weekly visits to the “fossil fuel divestment†page on Wikipedia. Based on a sample of weekly returns on 1,850 U.S. firms over the period 2012-2020, our econometric estimations report a positive relationship between investor attention to FFD and excess stock returns for U.S. fossil fuel-related firms. Therefore, contrary to what the FFD campaigners might expect, the stigmatization of the fossil fuel industry does not drive down the stock returns on fossil fuel-related firms.

Keywords: Fossil fuel divestment; Fossil fuel-related firms; Investor attention; Stock returns (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5547/01956574.43.6.ioua (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:enejou:v:43:y:2022:i:6:p:285-308

DOI: 10.5547/01956574.43.6.ioua

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Energy Journal
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().