In the Sustainable Finance Brown-Bag Seminar, internationally recognized sustainable finance experts present and discuss current research results. The seminar series explicitly addresses an international audience and shall facilitate the formation of cross-border networks among sustainable finance scholars and an interdisciplinary discourse. In this way, the seminar series aims on promoting scientific cooperation and contributing to the development of synergy potentials.
The Brown-Bag Seminar is jointly organized by the accompanying project Sustainable Finance and Climate Protection (SFCP) for the funding measure “Climate Protection and Finance” of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Sustainable Finance Research Platform (WPSF) funded by Stiftung Mercator. This cooperation shall contribute to a greater integration and further development of sustainable finance research in Germany.
We are pleased to invite you to the fifth event in the Brown Bag Seminar series.
In the upcoming seminar, Prof. Dr. Zacharias Sautner from the University of Zurich will present his joint paper Corporate Climate Lobbying.
To already get an impression of the content, you can find the paper’s abstract below:
A common concern is that ambitious climate policy is—at least in parts—obstructed by corporate lobbying activities. We quantify corporate anti- and pro-climate lobbying expenses, identify the largest corporate lobbyists and their motives, establish how climate lobbying relates to corporate business models, and document whether and how climate lobbying is priced in financial markets. Firms spend on average $277k per year on anti-climate lobbying ($185k on pro-climate lobbying). Recently, firms have tried to camouflage their climate lobbying activities. Large anti-climate lobbyists have more carbon-intensive business models and face more climate-related incidents in the future. Firms that spend more on anti-climate lobbying earn higher returns, probably because of a risk premium. Their stock prices went up when the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade Bill failed, and down when the Inflation Reduction Act was announced.
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Zacharias Sautner (Professor of Sustainable Finance at the Department of Finance of the University of Zurich (UZH))
