This study provides evidence on the existence of a negative greenium, i.e. a risk premium related to the greenness of a firm, based on European individual stock returns. We define a priced ‘greenness and transparency’ factor based on companies’ greenhouse gas emissions and the quality of their environmental disclosures, and show that what is priced by the market is the combination of environmental performance and environmental transparency. Based on this factor, we offer a tool to assess the exposure of a portfolio to the risk associated with the low-carbon transition, and hedge against it. We estimate that in a stressed scenario where greener and more transparent firms very much outperform brown stocks, there would be losses at the global level, including for European large banks, should investors fail to price climate-transition risks. These results call for the introduction of climate stress tests for systemically important financial institutions.

The first Global Climate Strike on March 15, 2019, represented a historical turning point in climate activism. We investigate the cross-section of stock price reactions to this event for a large sample of European firms. The strike's unanticipated success caused a decrease in the stock prices of carbon-intensive firms. The effect appears to be driven by the increased public attention to climate activism. Furthermore, after the first Global Climate Strike financial analysts downgraded their longer-term earnings forecasts on carbon-intensive firms.

We develop an econometric methodology to infer the path of risk premia from a large unbalanced panel of individual stock returns. We estimate the time-varying risk premia implied by conditional linear asset pricing models where the conditioning includes both instruments common to all assets and asset-specific instruments. The estimator uses simple weighted two-pass cross-sectional regressions, and we show its consistency and asymptotic normality under increasing cross-sectional and time series dimensions. We address consistent estimation of the asymptotic variance by hard thresholding, and testing for asset pricing restrictions induced by the no-arbitrage assumption. We derive the restrictions given by a continuum of assets in a multi-period economy under an approximate factor structure robust to asset repackaging. The empirical analysis on returns for about ten thousand U.S. stocks from July 1964 to December 2009 shows that risk premia are large and volatile in crisis periods. They exhibit large positive and negative strays from time-invariant estimates, follow the macroeconomic cycles, and do not match risk premia estimates on standard sets of portfolios. The asset pricing restrictions are rejected for a conditional four-factor model capturing market, size, value, and momentum effects.