Five Essays on Regulation, Capital Market Financing and Asset Pricing in the Era of Sustainable Finance (2005 - 2019) PDF Download

Author: Romain Berrou
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Our work consists in an exploration of the integration of sustainability in the financial sphere, with a particular focus on capital markets and its actors, centered on the following research question : “are financial markets putting a price on the positive sustainable and environmental performance of firms?”. Our research is carried out within the theoretical framework of asset pricing, which is currently at the crossroads of two major revolutions. On the one hand is the sustainability revolution, which brings a challenge to these actors in the form of a massive global systemic risk which can only be compared in its possible global impact to the threat once posed by weapons of mass destruction. As financial actors are starting to understand the economic threats - amongst others - that represent climate action failure, biodiversity loss, extreme weather events and environmental disasters, financial markets will inevitably change. The five essays in this PhD dissertation represent an attempt, using the most reliable data at hand, to start understanding how these financial markets could be evolving. On the other is the data revolution bringing both massive and constant flows of new forms of data to financial market actors, which are dealt with through constant improvements in computational power and the corresponding highly demanding statistical and machine learning methods needed to analyze these continuously growing datasets. The first step of our work consists in exploring how practitioners, academics and regulators are trying to define what constitutes sustainable finance and allows us to understand how consensus on this central issue has still not been reached to date. In a second step, we then look at climate-aligned firms - companies that originate more than 75% of their turnover from climate-aligned activities - and analyze how capital markets have been financing both traditional and climate-aligned US and EU firms in the last decades. This analysis allows us to understand that corporate bond markets have a much larger role to play in financing these firms than stock markets. In a third step, we then choose to focus our attention on corporate bond markets and on the very specific challenge of building reliable financial datasets on traditional corporate bonds, green corporate bonds and bonds that are issued by climate-aligned firms. In a fourth step, using this detailed data treatment procedure, we apply traditional asset pricing methodologies to a dataset of both traditional bonds and climate bonds going from 2005 to 2019, finding some differences between these two products. Finally, our last step constitutes an attempt to understand, with these same datasets, how newly developed factors and machine learning methods could also be used to price corporate bonds and to differentiate traditional bonds from climate bonds.