Stock Price Rewards to Climate Saints and Sinners: Evidence from the Trump Election

Stefano Ramelli, Alexander Wagner, Richard Zeckhauser and Alexandre Ziegler
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Stefano Ramelli: University of Zurich
Alexandre Ziegler: University of Zurich

Working Paper Series from Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government

Abstract: Donald Trump's 2016 election and the subsequent nomination of Scott Pruitt, a climate skeptic and self-proclaimed opponent of the Environmental Protection Agency's "activist agenda," to lead the EPA drastically shifted expectations on US climate change policy. Firms' stock-price reactions to these events reveal whether their climate strategies affected their valuations. As widely reported, firms in industries with high carbon intensity benefited, at least briefly. It might be expected that companies with "responsible" strategies on climate change would have lost value. In fact, investors actually rewarded such firms. The analysis shows that this observed climate responsibility premium is due, at least in part, to the strategic behavior of long horizon investors who look into the future to assess the valuation of corporations.

JEL-codes: G14 G38 G41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Working Paper: Stock Price Rewards to Climate Saints and Sinners: Evidence from the Trump Election (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp18-037

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