Shuang Chen

Shuang Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at the Swiss Finance Institute and the University of Lugano. She is on the job market.

Her research interests include institutional investors, natural language processing, and sustainable finance. 

Her personal website is  https://sites.google.com/view/shuang .

You can also message her directly via Twitter .

 Her job market paper is: Green Investors and Green Transition Efforts: Talk the Talk or Walk the Walk?

Abstract:

Are green investors investing in activities that actually benefit the environment or claim to benefit it? I answer this question by testing the relationship between investor decisions and firms' substantive green transition (walk) or communication of a green image (talk). I propose a novel measurement approach of walk and talk by applying natural language processing to online job postings. Since walk or talk requires workers specializing in different tasks, I use a firm's demand for walk-relevant (talk-relevant) workers to proxy for its efforts on walk (talk). I document firms that talk more are assigned a better environmental rating by ESG rating agencies and are held by more sustainable funds, keeping the walk level fixed. A higher level of talk also correlates with the increase in the number of institutional investors holding the stock and predicts a significantly higher stock return, while a higher level of walk does not. These findings show that investors' perceptions of green assets are heavily influenced by the talk level. Green investors allocate more resources to good talkers, potentially deviating from their goal of supporting substantive green transition.