Knowledge that Transforms

I investigate how to best measure firms' climate transition risk. Therefore, I gather a new dataset of firm-level climate transition risk metrics including reported EU taxonomy alignments of capex and revenues as well as emission intensities, E-scores from Refinitiv and MSCI, The Refinitiv Business Classification (TRBC), and text-based metrics. I find a strong divergence in transition risk metrics for companies. Thus, depending on the transition risk metric – a portfolio's transition risk profile will differ substantially. To evaluate the transition risk metrics, I measure the return sensitivity of nine brown and green portfolios– each constructed using a specific firm-level transition risk metric – to market-wide news indices that track transition risk shocks: the higher the sensitivity, the more effective the transition risk proxy. For green portfolios, I find that taxonomy and TRBC portfolios react most strongly to climate transition risk shocks. Forward-looking metrics seem to be particularly useful. For brown portfolios, only the MSCI E-score portfolio reacts significantly negative to transition risk shocks. The findings are robust across different world regions, different weighting and sampling methodologies and in an event-study setting. I conclude that markets currently price the upside risk for green firms stronger than the downside risk for brown firms.

We examine the effects of mandatory board gender quotas on unregulated firms that are connected to regulated ones via interlocking directorates. After the introduction of quotas, connected firms significantly increase their share of female directors relative to similar unconnected firms. The spillover effects are substantial — at least as large as the direct effects on regulated firms, challenging previous claims that quotas have no broader impact on women in business. Our results suggest that quotas indirectly broaden the supply of candidates for connected firms, along dimensions that include, but are not limited to, gender.

We study how U.S. dollar fluctuations transmit through domestic supply chains in emerging markets. Large firms borrow in foreign currency and extend trade credit to domestic partners, exposing the supply chain to exchange rate risk. We develop a model where financially constrained suppliers pass through shocks to buyers, while unconstrained firms absorb them. Using quarterly firm-level data from 19 emerging markets, we provide empirical evidence consistent with the model’s predictions. We find that even highly exposed firms reduce trade credit only modestly following a depreciation, while accepting large profit losses, suggesting that firm-to-firm credit relationships partially shield downstream firms from financial shocks.

We examine the impact of lost intellectual property protection on innovation, competition, firm performance, and valuation. We consider firms whose ability to protect intellectual property (IP) using patents is weakened following a major Supreme Court decision. We use large language models (LLM) to identify firms’ patent portfolios’ exposure to this decision and find an unequal impact. Large firms gain and small firms lose. Large impacted firms benefit as their sales growth increases and their exposure to lawsuits decreases. Small impacted firms lose as they face increased competition, product-market encroachment, and lower profits and valuations. They increase R&D and nondisclosure agreements.