More than 40 research papers were presented at GRASFI’s 7th Annual Conference hosted by Singapore Management University – all the papers and presentations can be accessed from the conference schedule. 2024 Sponsors BNP Paribas Asset Management and Ho Bee Land joined with GRASFI to make the following research awards at the 2024 Conference.
“Renaming with purpose: Investor response and fund manager behaviour after fund ESG-renaming” won the BNP Paribas Asset Management Best Paper Award for best overall research. In a global study of mutual funds, authors from Utrecht University (Kayshani Gibbon, Jeroen Derwall, Dirk Gerritsen, and Kees Koedijk) found that renaming funds subsequently improved ESG performance and reduced carbon intensity.
The Ho Bee Land Best Paper Award for Climate Finance Research was awarded to “Accountability of Corporate Emissions Reduction Targets” by Xiaoyan Jiang (Harvard Business School), Shawn Kim (The University of California, Berkeley) and Shirley Lu (Harvard Business School). The authors looked back to firms’ emission targets set for 2020 and whether these targets were met. They found no significant market reaction, changes in media sentiment, environmental scores, and environment-related shareholder proposals for firms that failed to meet their targets in contrast with the positive responses to the initial target setting.
The GRASFI Award to the best research from a PhD student was awarded to Christian Konz from Stanford GSB for his paper, “Do ESG investors care about carbon emissions? Evidence from securitized auto loans“. Using auto loans to study the effects of ESG investing, the author found that ESG mutual funds favour securitizations from issuers with high ESG scores even if the securitizations finance high-emissions vehicles, effectively lowering the cost of capital for high-emissions vehicles.
GRASFI’s 7th Annual Conference took place from the 2nd to 4th of September in Singapore, hosted by Singapore Management University. Awards of previous GRASFI Annual Conferences can be found here
