 Measuring Local Climate Change Attention: Does it Affect Investors and Firms?Leonard Kostovetsky, Lin Peng, Christopher Rauh and Yönaç, Muhammed No 19453, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: What drives people’s attitudes towards climate change and does it matter for economic outcomes? We address these questions by constructing a novel measure of local climate change attention using a comprehensive news dataset extracted from over 5,000 US newspapers from 2000-2022. We document an increasing trend in climate attention and growing polarization in climate-related sentiment across the US. Local climate attention, while comoves with national trends, exhibits significant regional variation. It correlates with local education levels, Democratic party affiliation, and extreme weather events, but not by local greenhouse gas emissions or toxic releases. Exploiting exogenous variation, we find that higher local climate attention is associated with increased individual investment in ESG-focused ETFs and improved environmental performance of local firms. These findings suggest local climate attention significantly influences investment decisions and corporate environmental policies. Keywords: Climate change; ESG; Sustainable investing (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19453 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
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