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Are Corporations Responding To Civil Society Pressure?: A Multilevel Analysis Of Corporate Emissions, Annika Marie Rieger May 2024

Are Corporations Responding To Civil Society Pressure?: A Multilevel Analysis Of Corporate Emissions, Annika Marie Rieger

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Previous research in the world-society tradition associates improvements in nation-level environmental outcomes with greater civil society integration. However, research in the world-systems tradition indicates these improvements depend on a nation’s position in the global political-economic hierarchy. To test whether these patterns are present at the organizational level, I estimate a multilevel model using corporate emissions data from the Carbon Disclosure Project and include interactions between world-system position and three measures of civil society integration: number of NGOs, proportion of corporations with climate-management incentives, and number of corporate UN Global Compact signatories. I find that the relationship between civil society pressure …


Investing In Climate: A Role For 'Sovereign Climate Funds', Marianna Kozintseva, Thierry Wizman Mar 2024

Investing In Climate: A Role For 'Sovereign Climate Funds', Marianna Kozintseva, Thierry Wizman

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Efforts to address climate change have generally been focused on deploying mitigation technologies. However, it is adaptation technologies (and climate risk transfer) that will have to gain an increasing share of an investment pool dedicated to climate if human systems are to stay resilient to climate forces. Just like mitigation projects, adaptation projects have a strong public goods aspect, wherein public returns exceed private returns, and thus call for the state’s involvement. We argue that sovereign climate funds (SCFs) - new types of sovereign wealth funds with a climate investment mandate - can be critical purpose-built conduits especially for undertaking …


Is Carbon Risk Priced In The Cross-Section Of Corporate Bond Returns?, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Quan Wen Sep 2023

Is Carbon Risk Priced In The Cross-Section Of Corporate Bond Returns?, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Quan Wen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines the pricing of a firm's carbon risk, measured by its carbon emissions intensity, in the cross-section of corporate bond returns. Contrary to the "carbon risk premium" hypothesis, we find bonds of firms with higher carbon emissions intensity earn significantly lower returns. This effect cannot be explained by a comprehensive list of bond characteristics and exposure to known risk factors. Investigating sources of the low carbon premium, we find the underperformance of bonds issued by carbon-intensive firms cannot be fully explained by divestment from institutional investors. Instead, our evidence is most consistent with investor underreaction to carbon risk, …


Blockchain And Regenerative Finance: Charting A Path Toward Regeneration, Marco Schletz, Axel Constant, Angel Hsu, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Roman Beck, Martin Wainstein Jul 2023

Blockchain And Regenerative Finance: Charting A Path Toward Regeneration, Marco Schletz, Axel Constant, Angel Hsu, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Roman Beck, Martin Wainstein

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The Regenerative Finance (ReFi) movement aims to fundamentally transform the governance of global common pool resources (CPRs), such as the atmosphere, which are being degraded despite international efforts. The ReFi movement seeks to achieve this by utilizing digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (D-MRV); tokenization of assets; and decentralized governance approaches. However, there is currently a lack of a clear path forward to create and implement models that actually drive the “Re-” in ReFi beyond perpetuating the existing extractive economics and toward actual regeneration. In addition, ReFi suffers from growing pains, lacking a common interoperability framework and definition for determining what …


Is Carbon Risk Priced In The Cross Section Of Corporate Bond Returns?, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Quan Wen Jun 2023

Is Carbon Risk Priced In The Cross Section Of Corporate Bond Returns?, Tinghua Duan, Frank Weikai Li, Quan Wen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This article examines the pricing of a firm’s carbon risk in the corporate bond market. Contrary to the “carbon risk premium” hypothesis, bonds of more carbon-intensive firms earn significantly lower returns. This effect cannot be explained by a comprehensive list of bond characteristics and exposure to known risk factors. Investigating sources of the low carbon alpha, we find the underperformance of bonds issued by carbon-intensive firms cannot be fully explained by divestment from institutional investors. Instead, our evidence is most consistent with investor underreaction to the predictability of carbon intensity for firm cash-flow news, creditworthiness, and environmental incidents.


Engaging Students Through Conversational Chatbots And Digital Content: A Climate Action Perspective, Thomas Menkhoff, Benjamin Gan Apr 2023

Engaging Students Through Conversational Chatbots And Digital Content: A Climate Action Perspective, Thomas Menkhoff, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

In this case study, we report experiences developing a conversational chatbot as a pre-class and post-class engagement tool for undergraduate students enrolled in sustainability-related courses aimed at educating them about the severity of climate change and the importance of climate action by offsetting one’s carbon footprint (e.g, by planting trees or mangroves in SEA). The intitiative supports the university’s sustainability efforts in general and our new sustainability major in particular aimed at helping students to achieve sustainability-related learning outcomes with reference to climate change and climate action (SDG 13), one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United …


Are Markets Interested In Adapting To Climate? Insights From Singapore, Stella Whittaker, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen Feb 2023

Are Markets Interested In Adapting To Climate? Insights From Singapore, Stella Whittaker, Tran Bao Phuong Nguyen

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

We have collected the views of leading practitioners and academics in Singapore involved in funding and financing urban climate change adaptation1 (thereon referred to as urban adaptation). Throughout this paper we discuss several vital perspectives on adaptation financing, namely responsibility for adaptation investment, the extent of government adaptation investment, private sector adaptation investment appetite and prospects for experimentation in adaptation financing. We also attempt to shed light on the existence or not of an adaptation financing gap2 in Singapore.


Developing Socio-Ecological Scenarios: A Participatory Process For Engaging Stakeholders, Andrew Allan, Emily Barbour, Robert J. Nicholls, Craig Hutton, Michelle Mei Ling Lim, Mashfiqus Sale-Hin, Md. Munsur Rahman Feb 2022

Developing Socio-Ecological Scenarios: A Participatory Process For Engaging Stakeholders, Andrew Allan, Emily Barbour, Robert J. Nicholls, Craig Hutton, Michelle Mei Ling Lim, Mashfiqus Sale-Hin, Md. Munsur Rahman

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Deltas are experiencing profound demographic, economic and land use changes and human-induced catchment and climate change. Bangladesh exemplifies these difficulties through multiple climate risks including subsidence/sea-level rise, temperature rise, and changing precipitation patterns, as well as changing management of the Ganges and Brahmaputra catchments. There is a growing population and economy driving numerous more local changes, while dense rural population and poverty remain significant. Identifying appropriate policy and planning responses is extremely difficult in these circumstances. This paper adopts a participatory scenario development process incorporating both socio-economic and biophysical elements across multiple scales and sectors as part of an integrated …


Climate Change And Sustainability In Asean Countries, David K. Ding, Sarah E. Beh Jan 2022

Climate Change And Sustainability In Asean Countries, David K. Ding, Sarah E. Beh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The ASEAN region is one of the most susceptible regions to climate change, with three of its countries—Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand—among those that have suffered the greatest fatalities and economic losses because of climate-related disasters. This paper reveals that the ASEAN’s environmental performance is sorely lagging other regions despite evidence of its cohesive and comprehensive efforts to mitigate emissions and build up adaptive capacity to climate-related disasters. Within the ASEAN, there exist gaps in environmental performance between each country. This suggests that increased cooperation between individual ASEAN countries is pertinent for the region to collectively combat climate change. In …


Technology Lends A Hand To Green E-Commerce, Hao Liang, Sin Mei Cheah Nov 2021

Technology Lends A Hand To Green E-Commerce, Hao Liang, Sin Mei Cheah

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The world has witnessed an e-commerce boom in the past 2 decades, and Asia-Pacific is now driving the latest wave of growth. The Covid-19 pandemic has further accelerated consumers' growing preference for online consumption, with the Asia-Pacific region raking US$230 billion in online retail sales in 2020. This article is adapted from the authors' teaching case study - Alibaba Cainiao's Smart Green Logistics Strategy: Good for the Earth, Good for the Business.


Declining Discount Rates In Singapore's Market For Privately Developed Apartments, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Alberto Salvo Sep 2021

Declining Discount Rates In Singapore's Market For Privately Developed Apartments, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Alberto Salvo

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Singapore's market for new privately developed apartments exhibits wide quasi-experimental variation in ownership tenure. We develop an empirical model in which prices are decomposed into the utility of housing services and a factor that shifts with asset tenure and the discount rate schedule, which we discipline to vary smoothly over time. We estimate discount rates that decline over time and, to accommodate the observed price differences, fall to 0.5-1.5% p.a. by year 400. The finding that households making sizable transactions do not entirely discount benefits accruing centuries from today is relevant, with the appropriate risk adjustment, for evaluating climate-change investments.


Declining Discount Rates In Singapore's Market For Privately Developed Apartments, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Alberto Salvo Sep 2021

Declining Discount Rates In Singapore's Market For Privately Developed Apartments, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Alberto Salvo

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Singapore's market for new privately developed apartments exhibits wide quasi-experimental variation in ownership tenure. We develop an empirical model in which prices are decomposed into the utility of housing services and a factor that shifts with asset tenure and the discount rate schedule, which we discipline to vary smoothly over time. We estimate discount rates that decline over time and, to accommodate the observed price differences, fall to 0.5-1.5% p.a. by year 400. The finding that households making sizable transactions do not entirely discount benefits accruing centuries from today is relevant, with the appropriate risk adjustment, for evaluating climate-change investments.


Digital Sustainability And Its Implications For Finance And Climate Change, Gerard George, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx Apr 2021

Digital Sustainability And Its Implications For Finance And Climate Change, Gerard George, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

As the pandemic forced the entire world to a virtual standstill, nature revived a little. The US emitted 10.3% less CO2 in 2020 than in 2019 and other regions similarly experienced emission declines. Depending on the source, global carbon emissions were down between 4 and 8% in 2020.2 Consumers globally have expressed more concern about sustainability, an observation confirmed by large survey research by Accenture, Kantar, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Ipsos.3 In its latest Emissions Gap Report4 , the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) explicitly connected the pandemic to climate change, nature loss, and pollution. Besides the acceleration of business …


Are Native Plants Green? Assessing Environmental Performances Of Locally-Owned Facilities, Narae Lee, Jiao Luo Apr 2021

Are Native Plants Green? Assessing Environmental Performances Of Locally-Owned Facilities, Narae Lee, Jiao Luo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the impact of corporate ownership and community conditions on firm environmental pollution. While the existing literature often thinks of environmental pollution as a unitary construct, we emphasize the distinction between toxic emissions, which have immediate but locally bounded impact, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions which have gradual but global impact, producing climate change. Using a facility-level panel of all manufacturing facilities in the US from 2010-2018, and leveraging within-facility changes in ownership status, we show that locally owned firms have lower levels of toxic emissions, but they are also less likely to report GHG emissions, and have higher …


The Spatial And Temporal Impact Of Agricultural Crop Residual Burning On Local Land Surface Temperature In Three Provinces Across China From 2015 To 2017, Wenting Zhang, Mengmeng Yu, Qingqing He, Tianwei Wang, Lu Lin, Kai Cao, Wei Huang, Peihong Fu, Jiaxin Chen Dec 2020

The Spatial And Temporal Impact Of Agricultural Crop Residual Burning On Local Land Surface Temperature In Three Provinces Across China From 2015 To 2017, Wenting Zhang, Mengmeng Yu, Qingqing He, Tianwei Wang, Lu Lin, Kai Cao, Wei Huang, Peihong Fu, Jiaxin Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

China has suffered from severe crop residue burning (CRB) for a long time. As a type of biomass burning, CRB leads to a huge alteration in climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases and particulates in the atmosphere and damages to surface characteristics on land. At present, a growing body of research focuses on the impact of biomass burning (BB) (e.g., forest fire, grass fire, and CRB) on climate change from the aspect of atmospheric process. Meanwhile, a small number of research studies have started to pay attention on the damage caused by BB (e.g. forest fire) on land …


Oil At Risk: Political Violence And Accelerated Carbon Extraction In The Middle East And North Africa, Ryan Knowles Merrill, Anthony W. Orlando Oct 2020

Oil At Risk: Political Violence And Accelerated Carbon Extraction In The Middle East And North Africa, Ryan Knowles Merrill, Anthony W. Orlando

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

What effect does the threat of expropriation have on resource extraction? Much of the economic literature suggests that uncertainty reduces investment, but the theory of risk-induced extraction suggests the opposite. In this paper, we test this theory in the context of political violence, which poses a real threat of state destabilization and violent expropriation of property rights. Facing this uncertainty, we find that oil producers in the Middle East and North Africa increase oil production in response to political violence. This finding has important negative consequences for the world in terms of climate change and demonstrates a previously untested mechanism …


Corporate Social Responsibility And Sustainable Finance: A Review Of The Literature, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog Sep 2020

Corporate Social Responsibility And Sustainable Finance: A Review Of The Literature, Hao Liang, Luc Renneboog

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to the incorporation of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations into corporate management, financial decision making, and investors’ portfolio decisions. Socially responsible firms are expected to internalize the externalities (e.g. pollution) they create, and are willing to be accountable to shareholders as well as a broader group of stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, local communities,…). Over the past two decades, various rating agencies developed firm-level measures of ESG performance, which are widely used in the literature. A problem for past and a challenge for future research is that these ratings show inconsistencies, which depend on the …


Do Firms Adapt To Climate Change? Evidence From Establishment-Level Data, Frank Weikai Li, Yupeng Lin, Zuben Jin, Zilong Zhang May 2020

Do Firms Adapt To Climate Change? Evidence From Establishment-Level Data, Frank Weikai Li, Yupeng Lin, Zuben Jin, Zilong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper examines firms’ adaptation to long-term changes in climatic conditions. Using detailed information of establishments owned by U.S. public firms from 1990 to 2012, we show that higher abnormal temperatures over the previous five years in a county lead to a significant reduction in local employment and the number of establishments. Further tests suggest that the decline in employment and establishments is largely due to a decline in local consumer demand rather than lower labor productivity. We also find that firms more likely take adaptive actions when their managers are more likely to believe in, or are concerned about, …


Tackling Regional Climate Change Impacts And Food Security Issues: A Critical Analysis Across Asean, Pif, And Saarc, Md. Saidul Islam, Edson Kieu Mar 2020

Tackling Regional Climate Change Impacts And Food Security Issues: A Critical Analysis Across Asean, Pif, And Saarc, Md. Saidul Islam, Edson Kieu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Climate change and food security issues are multi-faceted and transcend across national boundaries. Therefore, this paper begins with the premise that regional organizations are optimally positioned to address climate change and food security issues while actively engaging global partners to slow down or reverse current trajectories. However, the potential of regional organizations to play a central role in mitigating these vital concerns has not been realized. In this paper, we focus on three regional organizations—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) and set out to investigate …


Questionnaire Design Effects In Climate Change Surveys: Implications For The Partisan Divide, Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sungjong Roh, Norbert Schwarz Mar 2015

Questionnaire Design Effects In Climate Change Surveys: Implications For The Partisan Divide, Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sungjong Roh, Norbert Schwarz

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Despite strong agreement among scientists, public opinion surveys reveal wide partisan disagreement on climate issues in the united States. we suggest that this divide may be exaggerated by questionnaire design variables. Following a brief literature review, we report on a national survey experiment involving U.S. Democrats and Republicans (n = 2,041) (fielded August 25–September 5, 2012) that examined the effects of question wording and order on the belief that climate change exists, perceptions of scientific consensus, and support for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. wording a questionnaire in terms of “global warming” (versus “climate change”) reduced Republicans’ (but not Democrats’) existence …


Media Frames And Cognitive Accessibility: What Do "Global Warming" And "Climate Change" Evoke Partisan Minds?, Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sungjong Roh May 2014

Media Frames And Cognitive Accessibility: What Do "Global Warming" And "Climate Change" Evoke Partisan Minds?, Jonathon P. Schuldt, Sungjong Roh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Decades of research demonstrate that how the public thinks about a given issue is affected by how it is framed by the media. Typically, studies of framing vary how an issue is portrayed (often, by altering the text of written communication) and compare subsequent beliefs, attitudes, or preferences—taking a framing effect as evidence that a media frame (or frame in communication) instantiated a particular audience frame (or frame in thought). Less work, however, has attempted to measure frames in thought directly, which may illuminate cognitive mechanisms that underlie framing effects. In this vein, we describe a Web experiment (n = …