ESG II: Climate Finance and Impact Investing

The course is structured into three parts. The first part is an introduction session. In this introduction we recapitulate basic programming of STATA and a seminal paper in ESG or Climate Finance. Additionally, the tips of reading and writing academic paper is presented as a bridge to following parts.
In the second part we discuss academic articles presented by students (30 minutes presentation and 15 mins discussion).
Finally, the third part is a term paper. The “exam” consists of small empirical study carried out in a term paper where the newly acquired knowledge from the first and second part is applied.

This course gives students a better understanding on how ESG and Climate impact can be of value for an investor. On the one hand it shows the recent engagement in ESG and Climate Finance. For example, social responsibility, carbon emission, and climate changes have been receiving increasing attention, and we are wondering what kind of role those engagement play on financial assets and corporate decisions. On the other hand, it discusses the direct impact of corporate governance on company performance and whether this information is efficiently reflected in asset prices.

In presence

Each student required to pick and present an academic paper by herself/himself. Please use the following guidelines for your presentation. First, please tell us the overall big picture of the paper. Second, tell how the paper plans to get its point across. Third, tell what the paper empirically does/finds. Finally, in your opinion, tell us what we should do given what the article says (after all, if an academic paper has no practical use or value, then how good is it?). Tip: Here is a useful tip for presenting academic articles. Reading academic economics and finance papers is not as hard as you might think. There is a trick. The point of the paper and how it will try to get its point across are both usually covered in the introduction. Then, you can pretty much use the tables to point out what the paper does. The key results are usually in a few tables. Try to identify those key tables and present the key findings in them.

50% Term Paper
50% Presentation and Quality of Participation

Participation is strongly encouraged as it accounts for a substantial part of your grade. Students are required to attend all presentations (not only their own).