5 - 7 September 2022

5th Annual

GRASFI Conference

Hosted by the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) and the Center for Competence for Sustainable Finance (CCSF), University of Zurich.

Zurich logos

Congratulations to the winners of this year’s GRASFI Paper Prizes

GRASFI Best Paper Award 2022

Julia Bingler, Mathias Kraus, Markus Leippold & Nicolas Webersinke

Cheap Talk in Corporate Climate Commitments: The Role of Active Institutional Ownership, Signaling, Materiality, and Sentiment Firm sustainability: How do investors drive it ahead, if at all?

Best Paper Award for Transparency for Stakeholders

Daniel Schmidt, Marco Ceccarelli, Mikael Homanen & Simon Glossner

Which institutional investors drive corporate sustainability?

 

Best Paper Award for Climate Finance Research

Quyen Nguyen, Adam Kitto, Ivan Diaz-Rainey, Ben McNeil, Nic Pittman and Renzhu Zhang

Scope 3 Emissions: Data Quality and Machine Learning Prediction Accuracy

 

Best Paper Award for Impactful Research

Adelina Barbalau, Federica Zeni

The Optimal Design of Green Securities

 

Best PhD Paper Award

Claudio Rizzi,

Nature as a Defense from Disasters: Natural Capital and Municipal Bond Yields

Runner-up:

Glen Gostlow,

Pricing Physical Climate Risk in the Cross-Section of Returns

Bram van der Kroft & Dennis Bams,

Inflated ESG ratings through socially responsible investing: An inverse relation to sustainable performance

 

 

The 5th Annual Conference is currently being planned as in-person event by the Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP) and the Center of Competence in Sustainable Finance (CCSF) at the University of Zurich.

Registration

There are 4 registration categories: 1) Academic Researcher, 2) PhD Students, 3) Government, Regulator and Civil Society, 4) Practitioner.

Registration fees vary depending on the category. All attendees, including paper presenters, must pay the registration fee before the Conference start. 

Supporters

GRASFI 2022 has been generously supported by:

Venues

Kunsthaus Zurich

RAA building - University of Zurich

Date and Time

Monday, 5 September 2022

14:45 – 16:15 CET

Session

Paper Session A1

ESG-Ratings & Data: How do we make sense of it?

Session Chairs:
Prof. Timo Busch, Hamburg University
Bérénice Lasfargues, BNP Paribas AM

PAPERS

 

Exploring ITR score: Framing robust company-specific benchmarks and future company-level GHG emissions ranges

Authors: Ruben Haalebos and Felix Fouret

ESG Rating Revisions and Stock Returns

Authors: Rients Galema and Dirk Gerritsen

Divestment, information asymmetries, and inflated ESG ratings

Authors: Bram van der Kroft and Dennis Bams.

Abstracts

Exploring ITR score: Framing robust company-specific benchmarks and future company-level GHG emissions ranges

As Investors are looking to align their portfolios with the goals of the Paris Agreement, portfolio metrics like Implied Temperature Rise (ITR) are becoming increasingly popular. We describe a Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures-aligned ITR methodology and benchmark the results.

ESG Rating Revisions and Stock Returns

We study the six-month impact of ESG rating revisions on U.S. stocks. Decreases are followed by annualized negative returns of 3%, which are not driven by ESG-specific news; partly driven by sustainable index changes; and in line with long-term investors decreasing holdings after a rating decrease.

Divestment, information asymmetries, and inflated ESG ratings

We causally show that ESG ratings are inversely related to sustainable performance because firms face cost of capital incentives to inflate ratings given socially responsible investing under information asymmetries. Consequently, their promises of future sustainable performance do not realize, even up to 15 years in the future.